This website is no longer being updated. Visit Dartmouth Now for all news published after June 7, 2010.
Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs • Press Release
Tanzeem Choudhury, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, was recently honored with an award from the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award recognizes and supports the activities of teacher/scholars early in their careers, and the awardees are often considered emerging leaders in their respective fields. Recipients are selected for career development plans that integrate research and teaching.
Choudhury works on developing computational techniques to better understand and predict human behavior and social interactions.
“I use sensors to make sense of people,” said Choudhury, talking about using mobile sensors, tiny computers that can be embedded virtually anywhere, such as on a person or in cell phones.
Research supported by this award works toward developing new community-based techniques for capturing, recognizing, and interpreting human activities from body-worn sensors. Choudhury is building machine-learning methods that can collectively learn about behaviors within a group of people with minimal human supervision and can adapt to new activities and new environments.
“We are developing a community-guided learning paradigm, which leverages people’s social ties and behavioral similarities,” said Choudhury. She reported that the research in human behavior modeling has the potential to transform community health assessment by collecting detailed and nuanced clinically-relevant information continuously, inexpensively, and unobtrusively, over long periods of time. Choudhury will collaborate with medical researchers to evaluate the usefulness of the technology in measuring the degree of independence among the elderly and social interactions among high-functioning autistic children.
Other Dartmouth professors who have been honored with NSF Career Awards in the last five years include Devin Balkcom, Christopher Bailey-Kellogg, Amit Chakrabarti, Fabio Pellacini, and Sean Smith in the computer science department; Petia Vlahovska and Reza Olfati-Saber at the Thayer School of Engineering; Kristina Lynch, Barrett Rogers, and Robert Caldwell in physics and astronomy; David Peterson in the linguistics and cognitive science program, and David Bucci in psychological and brain sciences.
Dartmouth has television (satellite uplink) and radio (ISDN) studios available for domestic and international live and taped interviews. For more information, call 603-646-3661 or see our Radio, Television capability webpage.