Computer Science Colloquium
Friday, December 06
2:35pm in Wege Auditorium
Systems research to address societal problems
Many of systems and networking research focusses on improving performance, often defined in terms of throughput, latency, and robustness. Instead our lab have been working on systems research to address societal problems such as accessibility, sustainability, and inequity in network access.
In this talk, I will focus largely on our work on accessibility. Blind users face several challenges when using smartphones applications, starting from fast-draining battery to inaccessible smartphone interactions. There has been significant work in the HCI community on understanding (and addressing) the challenges faced by blind users. We show that combining systems approaches such as virtualization and sensing with a human-centered design can result in generalizable solutions to address problems in accessibility.
Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then was a Computing Innovations Fellow at the University of Washington. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of (1) improving QoE and equitable access of Internet applications, (2) improving the usability, accessibility, and privacy of mobile systems, and (3) sustainable NLP. She is the recipient of the SIGMOBILE Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a Computing Innovation Fellowship, a VMWare Early Career award, several Google research awards, and the Applied Networking Research Prize. She is passionate about improving the diversity in Computer Science and leads the diversity committee at Stony Brook, is the faculty advisor for the WiCS and WPhD groups at Stony Brook, and is an active member of the N2Women group.