KEB 307 - 151 Holdsworth Way, MA 01002
I am Yasra, a final-year Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working withProf. Fatima M. Anwar.
I am a Human-Centered Computing researcher focused on advancing Mixed Reality (MR) by measuring, interpreting, and adapting key system parameters and services to improve user comfort, safety, and overall experience. My research focuses on designing the next generation of adaptive Human-Centered MR by aligning technologies with user experiences and integrating human factors into every aspect of MR design and development, using tools and techniques from Systems, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Machine Learning (ML).
I actively collaborate withProf. Victoria Interrante at University of Minnesota,Prof. Michael Zink at University of Massachusetts Amherst,Prof. Luis Garcia at University of Utah, and the CTO of Steg AIDr. Joseph DeGol.
Latest News
- 09/2024: Excited to be named MIT EECS Rising Star 2024 (~19% acceptance rate).
- 09/2024: Our work, 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.