PhD student Heba Aly selected to participate in "Rising Stars in EECS 2019".

Aly’s research work focuses on spatial systems, mobile/wireless computing and crowdsourcing. She has worked on automatically building accessibility maps where indoor/outdoor spaces are marked with their accessibility state for the different disability types. She has worked on addressing different challenges to realize the system, e.g. accurate indoor and outdoor tracking, and valuation of spatiotemporal data.

Aly’s research interests include intelligent systems, location determination systems and mobile/ubiquitous computing. She is interested in leveraging machine learning, signal processing and AI algorithms with the ubiquitous sensor-rich mobile devices (e.g. smartphones & smartwatches) to build intelligent systems that can help improve people's well-being. Additionally, Aly is interested in pushing the status-quo to achieve ubiquitous, accurate and robust indoor/outdoor location, which she believes can open the door for a wide range of new location-based services (LBSs).

Prof. Ashok Agrawala is Aly’s PhD advisor.

Launched at MIT in 2012, the annual event has since been hosted at the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Stanford University.It is being hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this year, OCTOBER 29 - NOVEMBER 1, 2019.