Asif Salekin
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Mail code: 9709Campus: Tempe
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Asif Salekin directs the Laboratory for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Sensing (UIS Lab) at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, serving as an assistant professor at the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering (SBHSE) and as a graduate faculty member in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering, advising PhD students in the Computer Science and BME programs.
He is also serving as an affiliated faculty member in the John Shufeldt School of Medicine and Medical Engineering, leading efforts to integrate practical human-sensing AI and digital health training into medical education.
Additionally, he is serving as a Research affiliate at the Mayo Clinic, AZ, an affiliated faculty member at SUNY Upstate Medical University, NY, and Syracuse University, NY.
Salekin's research sits at the intersection of Human-Centered Computing, Machine Learning, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Usable Sensing Security and Privacy within the realm of Ubiquitous Computing, where a core focus is to integrate human-centered computing and sensing solutions to advance Smart and Mobile Health. His works have been featured in top-tier computer science venues, including IMWUT/Ubicomp, DAC, AAAI Applied Intelligence, EWSN, INTERSPEECH, etc., and prestigious journals, such as Nature Molecular Psychiatry, 2023, and PNAS 2022. Notably, one of his papers on Preclinical-stage Alzheimer’s Disease Detection received the prestigious IAAI Deployed Application Award in 2021. In 2016, his paper, titled "AsthmaGuide," was nominated for the Best Paper award at the Wireless Health 2016. He received the Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Research from the UVA CS Department in 2018.
To date, Salekin's research has been funded by two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and four National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. Currently, he is serving as an associate editor for the journal The Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) and for the conference UbiComp, which is the leading publication platform for ubiquitous computing research. Salekin received his doctorate from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia (Advisor: John A. Stankovic).
PhD. University of Virginia 2019
Asif's research takes a multi-disciplinary approach to developing novel and practical human-centered computing and sensing solutions. His research interests go beyond the conventional learning or sensing approaches and address the research challenges, such as:
- Investigating the natural distribution shifts within real human-centered applications, understanding their impact, and developing solutions to attain robustness against these shifts.
- Addressing issues of Algorithmic Fairness and bias mitigation in human-centered computing, especially in scenarios where the factors subject to inequitable treatment remain unidentified.
- Multimodal-integration and Co-teaching-based ubiquitous and human-centered computing solutions.
- Interpretability of ML inference, particularly in the context of healthcare applications.
- Scalable and compressed ubiquitous computing solutions addressing the challenges of resource-constrained edge computing platforms.
- Trustworthiness and reliability in automated human-centered sensing, computing, and actuation/intervention.
- Addressing the security and privacy challenges associated with human-centric computing, sensing, and Internet-of-things (IoT) applications.
Current Ph.D. Students:
- Yi Xiao (ASU CS PhD)
- Harshit Sharma (ASU CS PhD)
- Shaily Roy (ASU CS PhD)
- Sachin Deb (ASU CS PhD)
Graduated Ph.D. Students:
- Dr. Jingyu Xin (SU CS PhD)
- Dr. Brian Philip Testa (SU CS PhD)
- Dr. Sawinder Kaur (SU CS PhD)
Check my website for the full list of publications.
Selected Recent Publications (from 2022-2025):
2025:
- Xiao, Yi, Harshit Sharma, Sawinder Kaur, Dessa Bergen-Cico, and Asif Salekin. "Human Heterogeneity Invariant Stress Sensing." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 9, no. 3 (2025). (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 2025
- Kaur, Sawinder, Avery Gump, Yi Xiao, Jingyu Xin, Harshit Sharma, Nina R. Benway, Jonathan L. Preston, and Asif Salekin. "CRoP: Context-wise Robust Static Human-Sensing Personalization." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 9, no. 2 (2025): 1-34. (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 2025
- Yi Xiao, Harshit Sharma, Victoria Tumanova, and Asif Salekin, “Psychophysiology-aided Perceptually Fluent Speech Analysis of Children Who Stutter” ICCPS '25: ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (with CPS-IoT Week 2025).
2024:
- Jingyu Xin, Brooks Gump, Stephen Maisto, Randall Jorgensen, Tej Bhatia, Vir Phoha, Asif Salekin, “Decoding Hostility from Conversations through Speech and Text Integration,” In 2024 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). IEEE.
- Sawinder Kaur, Yi Xiao, and Asif Salekin, (2024). VeriCompress: A Tool to Streamline the Synthesis of Verified Robust Compressed Neural Networks from Scratch. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 38(21), 22899-22905.
- Quinn, Thomas P., et al. "A primer on the use of machine learning to distil knowledge from data in biological psychiatry." Nature Molecular psychiatry (2024): 1-15.
- Huaiyu Shi, Andrew Kowalczewski, Danny Vu, Xiyuan Liu, Asif Salekin, Huaxiao Yang, Zhen Ma, Organoid intelligence: Integration of organoid technology and artificial intelligence in the new era of in vitro models, The Journal of Medicine in Novel Technology and Devices, Volume 21, 2024, 100276, ISSN 2590-0935, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medntd.2023.100276.
2023:
- Yi Xiao, Harshit Sharma, Zhongyang Zhang, Dessa Bergen-Cico, Tauhidur Rahman, Asif Salekin, "Reading Between the Heat": Co-Teaching Body Thermal Signatures for Non-intrusive Stress Detection, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 7, 4, Article 189 (December 2023), 30 pages.
- Brian Testa, Yi Xiao, Harshit Sharma, Avery Gump, and Asif Salekin. "Privacy against Real-Time Speech Emotion Detection via Acoustic Adversarial Evasion of Machine Learning," Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 2023.
- Benway, N. R., Preston, J. L., Salekin, A., Xiao, Y., Sharma, H., & McAllister, T., "Classifying Rhoticity of /ɹ/ in Speech Sound Disorder using Age-and-Sex Normalized Formants," Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023, 4563-4567: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), Dublin, Ireland. doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-312.
- Eric J. Barnett, Daniel G. Onete, Asif Salekin, Stephen V. Faraone, "Genomic Machine Learning Meta-regression: Insights on Associations of Study Features with Reported Model Performance," the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 2023.
- Manasa Kalanadhabhatta, Shaily Roy, Trevor Grant, Asif Salekin, Tauhidur Rahman and Dessa Bergen-Cico, “Detecting PTSD Using Neural and Physiological Signals: Recommendations from a Pilot Study,” In 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). IEEE.
- Nina Benway, Rachel Theodore, Elaine Hitchcock, Yuan Rose, Asif Salekin, Wendy Liang, Tara McAllister, and Jonathan L. Preston, “Reproducible Speech Research with the Artificial-Intelligence-Ready PERCEPT Corpora,” The Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2023.
2022:
- Harshit Sharma, Yi Xiao, Victoria Tumanova, Asif Salekin, “Psychophysiological Arousal in Young Children Who Stutter: An Interpretable AI Approach”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 2022.
- Jingyu Xin, Vir V. Phoha, Asif Salekin, "Combating False Data Injection Attacks on Human-Centric Sensing Applications", Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/Ubicomp), 2022.
- Nina Benway, Jonathan L. Preston, Elaine Hitchcock, Asif Salekin, Harshit Sharma and Tara McAllister, “PERCEPT-R: An Open-Access American English Child/Clinical Speech Corpus Specialized for the Audio Classification of /ɹ/”, Proc. Interspeech 2022.
- Cramer et al., “Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States”, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), 2022.
- Zhang, Z., Xu, Z., Ahmed, Z., Salekin, A., & Rahman, T. (2022). "Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution in Arbitrary Input-Output Band Settings," In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 749-759), 2022.
A core focus of Asif's research program is to integrate computing solutions to advance health assessment, identify latent markers, automate health monitoring, and facilitate automated interventions. His recent and ongoing projects include real-world health applications, such as:
- Automated assessment of stress and craving in individuals with substance-use disorder (SUD) (e.g., opioid, smoking, and alcohol use disorders) and providing reliable, trustworthy, and just-in-time interventions to mitigate craving.
- Understanding mental, speech, and sensorimotor factors of children-stuttering and providing automated interventions.
- Developing personalized, robust, and algorithmically fair, speech error assessment for individuals with residual speech sound disorders (RSSDs).
- Predicting the final pathologic stage and chemotherapy response in bladder cancer patients using early-stage imaging and pathology data.
- Passive assessment of mental health (e.g., depression, social anxiety disorder, PTSD, etc.) and affective states.
- Automated assessment of socio-behavioral well-being of dairy cattle and providing adaptive just-in-time interventions to the farmers.
- Automated monitoring of asthma and dementia patients.
- Predicting COVID-19 mortality, risk factors, and its effect on mental health.
- Identify, visualize, and interpret health-related (for Autism, Alzheimer's, and PTSD) atypical brain-activity patterns from EEG, MRI (fMRI), and fNIRS signals, etc.
- Identifying markers of chronic kidney disease (CKD).
Courses
2026 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| BME 598 | Special Topics |
| BME 494 | Special Topics |
2025 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| CSE 792 | Research |
| CSE 799 | Dissertation |
| CSE 584 | Internship |
| BME 598 | Special Topics |
| BME 494 | Special Topics |
2025 Summer
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| CSE 792 | Research |
2025 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| CSE 792 | Research |
2024 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| CSE 792 | Research |
| CSE 593 | Applied Project |