Contact Info

ethomaz at utexas dot edu
Twitter: @ethomaz

EER 7.818
2501 Speedway
Austin, TX 78712

Office Hours

Fall 2024
Wed 1-2pm (EER 7.818)

Teaching

Fall 2024
EE422C Software Design II

Spring 2025
EE382V Human Signals

Ph.D. Students

Dawei Liang
Priyanka Khante
Yufei Shen
Sloke Shrestha
Alice Zhang
Gautham Gudur

Ph.D. Alumni

Keum San Chun (2021)
Sibel Health

Xuewen Yao (2023)
Microsoft

Rebecca Adaimi (2023)
Oura

Affiliations

I am an Associate Professor and William H. Hartwig Fellow in the The Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where I direct the Human Signals lab. My research focuses on human-centered sensing and machine perception using wearable and ubiquitous technologies. My students and I explore how to build computational systems that make sense of people; intelligent systems that recognize and model people's behaviors and activities, health conditions, emotional state, surronding context, social interactions and more. I am affiliated with DICE, bioECE and SES. I am also a member of WNCG, iMAGiNE and a faculty affiliate of CAPS. I am an Editor of IMWUT and Steering Committee Chair for UbiComp.

---

Fall 2025 Ph.D. Positions Available: The Human Signals Lab is considering applicants for Ph.D. positions with strong interest in human-centered computing, wearables, machine learning and health. If interested, please visit the page for prospective students, and make sure you formally apply to the Texas ECE graduate program.

Recent News | All

---

  Ubicomp 2024 in Australia
Attended Ubicomp in Melbourne. It was a packed week, with the conference itself plus steering committee and editorial meetings. To top it off, I participated in a workshop on the future of Ubicomp at UNSW Sydney organized by Flora Salim. A lovely time down under.
Oct 2024

  Promotion to Associate Professor
Very happy and thankful that my promotion to Associate Professor has been approved and is now official, starting in Fall 2024.
Aug 2024

  Dawei Defends PhD Dissertation
Dawei completed his doctorate by defending his PhD thesis titled "Towards Practical Acoustic Sensing for Human Activity Recognition on Commercial Wearable Devices". His work was featured at IMWUT, ISWC, MobileHCI and other top venues.
Mar 2024

  LLMs and Data Annotation
We have been exploring how LLMs might have an impact in activity recognition. Sloke has conducted studies centered on how they might change data annotation. For more details, check the paper, which will be presented at the CHASE 2024 conference. The paper is titled "Leveraging Large Language Models to Annotate Activities of Daily Living Captured with Egocentric Vision".
Feb 2024

  NIH R01 Awarded
Ted Walls, Kathleen Melanson (both at the University of Rhode Island) and I have been granted funding from NIH to explore new techniques for dietary monitoring using a novel wearable device. We thank NIH for their support, and are looking forward to advancing this research.
Jan 2024

  New IMWUT and UbiComp Service Positions
After many years as Associate Editor of IMWUT, I have been invited to join the board as Editor. Additionally, I was elected chair of the UbiComp Steering Committee. Very happy to continue contributing to my academic community in these new roles.
Nov 2023

Recent Activities | All

---

Select Publications | All

---