I recently completed my PhD at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Social Computing Group at Idiap Research Institute, working with Daniel Gatica-Perez. My research interests lie broadly at the intersection of computer science and social science, in particular application of large-scale data mining to various social and urban contexts. Before joining Idiap, I completed my Masters at ETH Zurich and Bachelors from Manipal Institute of Technology.

Research Interests

My doctoral research takes a multidisciplinary approach to the computational characterization of public places from the perspective of urban perception and study how young people can document and use these urban spaces, by integrating concepts from urban studies, human geography, social psychology, and computing, including mobile crowdsensing and online crowdsourcing, machine learning, and multimedia analysis. Before I began my PhD studies at EPFL, I was conducting research at the intersection of social and urban computing, where I was involved in building systems and tools, in addition to data analysis to understand cities both at the micro and macro level.

News and Updates

• Jan 2018: Our long-awaited paper on characterizing drinking behavior of young adults using smartphones has been published at IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.

• Oct 2017: Our research on examining ambiance perception through scene semantics was presented at the MM 2017.

• June 2017: Presented our research on comparing urban impressions between population groups at ACM ICMR 2017.

• December 2016: Awarded the Idiap PhD Student Research Award 2016.

• December 2016: Our collaboration with Lausanne’s Observatory of Security on street harassment was covered by various local media outlets including RTS, La Tele, 24 Heures, 20min, Le Temps, and Le Courrier.

• November 2016: Gave a talk titled What Foursquare Can’t Tell: Characterizing Perception in Urban Environments at the Swiss Machine Learning Day 2016 at EPFL.

• November 2016: Publicly defended my PhD thesis at EPFL. Yay!

• October 2016: Presented the Youth@Night project at the Workshop on Social Media and Public Security in Paris.

• March 2016: Together with Daniel, we presented the SenseCityVity project as part of the Essential Talk Series, organized by CODEV at EPFL.