KEB 307, 151 Holdsworth Way, Amherst, MA, 01002
I am Yasra, a final-year Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) working withFatima Anwar.
I am a Human-Centered Computing researcher studying how everyday human signals can becaptured,modeled, andtranslated to make interactive AI systems reflect and respond to human experience. Using techniques from Systems, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Machine Learning (ML), I develop methods to sense and interpret human variability and context shifts in cognition, presence, and collaboration, using Mixed Reality as a testbed to turn these signals into inputs that make AI moreadaptive,collabrative,safe, andfair.
I actively collaborate withVictoria Interrante (University of Minnesota),Michael Zink (UMass),Luis Garcia (University of Utah), andJoseph DeGol (CTO, StegAI).
Open Source Research Artifact
HoloSet - A Dataset for Visual-Inertial Pose Estimation in Extended Reality (100,000+ samples)
My research is featured at following national and international news outlets
BBC, UMASS, College of Engineering, ScienceDaily, TechXplore
Latest News
- 10/2025: I am giving an invited talk at ECE, Duke University.
- 09/2025: Our work on 5G timing is conditionally accepted at ACM/IEEE Sensys 2026.
- 08/2025: Serving as IEEE AIXVR’26 Technical Program Chair for In-process work and Demo.
- 05/2025: I will be giving an invited talk at the AT&T Labs.
- 05/2025: I will be at Meta Headquaters at Menlo Park to attend ML and Systems Rising Star.
- 05/2025: I will be attending CPS-IoT week at Irvine, CA to run Sensors S&P workshop.
- 04/2025: Gave invited talk at IMMERSE Symposium’25 at UIUC.
- 02/2025: Our work on Distractions received Honorable Mention for Best Paper at IEEE VR’25.
- 02/2025: Serving as Technical Program Committee Member at VRST.
- 02/2025: I will be giving an invited talk at the Nokia Bell Labs.
- 01/2025: Two position papers are accepted at NSF ImmerCom Workshop.
- 12/2024: Two papers accepted to IEEE VR 2025 Yay!!!
- 12/2024: Serving as Associate Chair at ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX)’25.
- 11/2024: Serving as Sensors S&P Technical Program Committee Chair at CPSWeek 2025.
- 09/2024: Excited to be named ML and Systems Rising Star 2025.
- 09/2024: Excited to be named MIT EECS Rising Star 2024 (~19% acceptance rate).
- 09/2024: Hybrid Knowledge Distillation for Robust and Accurate FL (HYDRA-FL), is accepted at NeurIPS’24.
- 09/2024: Elected as Chair of UMASS College of Engineering Dean’s Graduate Advisory Group.
- 09/2024: Featured in UMASS, College of Engineering website (again!). Check it out here!
- 08/2024: Technical Program Committee member at DATA@Buildsys and ACM S3@Mobicom 2024.
- 08/2024: Our work on Sustainable Collaborative Mixed Reality is accepted at ISEMV 2024.
- 08/2024: Our work on Presence and Safety in Mixed Reality is accepted at SafeAR@ISMAR 2024.
- 07/2024: Received $2500 UMASS Campus Climate Improvement Grant (with Emily Krems and others)!
- 06/2024: Our work on Neurosymbolic feature extraction for SLAM is accepted at IROS 2024.
- 04/2024: Our work on Federated Learning fairness is accepted at ACM FAact’24 (w/Khotso et al.).
- 04/2024: Received 2024 College of Engineering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Award, an honor bestowed to only one student college-wide every year.
- 04/2024: Excited to be named 2024 CPS Rising Star (~16% acceptance rate).
- 12/2023: Our work on understanding the impact of conditioning on Presence and reaction time in MR is accepted at IEEE VR’24.
- 11/2023: Our work on quantifying Presence in MRis featured in UMASS website, ScienceDaily, BBC,andTechXplore, and is gaining social media traction.
- 11/2023: Our work on exploring stealthy attack surfaces in Mixed Reality is accepted at IEEE AIxVR’24.
- 09/2023: Our work on quantifying Presence in Mixed Reality is accepted at IEEE TVCG.
- 06/2023: Selected to participate in the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an opportunity provided exclusively to outstanding young researchers in mathematics and computer science.
- 05/2023: Excited to join UMASS ECE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee.
- 04/2023: Our work on jointly managing electrical and thermal energy is accepted at ACM e-Energy’23.
- 03/2023: Ph.D. milestone: I passed my Ph.D. Qualifying Exam at UMASS, ECE.
- 11/2022: Received Best PhD Forum Presentation Award at ACM SenSys’22.
- 07/2022: Excited to be part of UMASS Turing Summer Program as an instructor.
- 06/2022: Happy to be serving as a member of the Shadow Program Committee in SenSys and EuroSys, 2022.
- 04/2022: Featured in UMASS, College of Engineering website. Check it out here.
- 03/2022: Happy to announce that I am Computing Research Association (CRA)-E(ducation) Graduate Fellow for next two years.
- 03/2022: Excited to announce that I am a finalist at Three Minute Thesis (3MT) at UMASS, Amherst. Watch my finalist talk here!
- 02/2022: Attending Grad Cohort for Women by CRA as a scholar in April 2022.
- 02/2021: Excited to be part of Google CSRMP in 2021.
- 07/2019: Selected as Grace Hopper Scholar.