ECE’s Yasra Chandio Qualifies as a “Rising Star” in Both Actual and Virtual Reality
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In the past year, Ph.D. Student Yasra Chandio of the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department has collected a diverse array of prestigious honors and publications related to her groundbreaking research on “mixed reality,” an artful blend of physical and digital worlds. Chandio, who conducts her research in the EMTECH laboratory of ECE Assistant Professor Fatima Anwar, recently received three prestigious accolades in her field when she was named an MIT EECS Rising Star by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Rising Star by the University of Virginia (UVA), and a young researcher at the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
Beyond that, Chandio was the lead author on four papers published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). One paper was published by the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics; another by the premier conference for research on augmented reality and virtual reality, IEEE VR 2024; and another by the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and eXtended and Virtual Reality (IEEE AIxVR). In addition, a paper describing her work on “Neurosymbolic Feature Extraction” has been published by the 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), a premier robotics conference. A summary of these publications, as explained below, points out their collective significance.
MIT selected Chandio to participate in its hand-picked Academic Career Workshop in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), also known as “Rising Stars in EECS,” which will take place on October 24th and 25th on the MIT campus. The event will be an intensive workshop for graduate students and postdocs from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. As MIT explains, “This year’s workshop will bring together the world’s brightest researchers in EECS for two days of scientific interactions and discussions about navigating the early stages of careers in academia.”
In a similar vein, UVA invited Chandio to its CPS workshop last May 29th at its campus in Charlottesville, where she was selected by the workshop program committee as a CPS Rising Star, based on her research excellence and academic-leadership potential.
Chandio’s exceptional potential was further underscored by her selection as a young researcher at the 2023 Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a conference where “the brightest minds in mathematics and computer science, laureates and young researchers alike, connect, share knowledge, find inspiration and push forward.”
Leading up to those honors, Chandio built up her qualifications for rising-star status as the lead author on four significant publications.
Last fall, the UMass Amherst News Office released an article about a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, which describes Chandio’s research in Anwar’s lab on how “immersive engagement in mixed reality can be measured with reaction time.” In that context, she and her colleagues developed a system tool to measure the subjective feeling of “presence” – or a user’s immersive engagement in a mixed-reality program – with an objective metric of the user’s reaction time.
One good example of measuring and fine-tuning such presence is when surgeons require millimeter-level precision while operating and rely on mixed reality as a guide to tell them exactly where to make their incisions. As Chandio describes this scenario, “If we just show the organ…and we don’t adjust for the height of the surgeon, that could be delaying the surgeon and could have inaccuracies. However, if the mixed-reality system is internally monitoring presence, it can make adjustments in real-time, like moving the virtual-organ rendering closer to eye level.”
Chandio’s work on this paper received widespread media coverage, including from outlets such as the BBC, ScienceDaily, and TechXplore.
In a related paper, Chandio was lead author on an article published by the influential IEEE VR Conference. That paper assesses how to improve the relationship between presence and reaction time in an effort to boost the “immersive engagement” of a user in mixed reality. As the abstract says, “To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory study where the relationship between presence and reaction time was assessed under three different conditioning scenarios: control, positive, and negative.”
Chandio was also lead author on an article published in IEEE AIxVR that focused on a novel area of mixed reality security. Whereas prior research has focused on more generic aspects of security, such as authentication and vulnerability analysis, Chandio’s paper is, according to the abstract, “the first to propose, design, and evaluate simultaneous multi-modal spatiotemporal attacks.” This is critical given that the multi-model nature of mixed reality devices “exposes them to attacks on sensor modalities across spatiotemporal axes.”
Finally, the IEEE IROS conference published a paper by Chandio and her co-authors from Anwar’s lab, the University of Utah, and Steg AI. The paper on “Neurosymbolic Feature Extraction” attempts to resolve a critical issue in autonomous robots, autonomous vehicles, and humans wearing mixed-reality headsets. They all require accurate and reliable tracking services for safety-critical applications in dynamically changing, real-world environments. As the paper’s abstract summarizes one solution, “Our neurosymbolic architecture undertakes adaptive-feature extraction, optimizing parameters via learning while employing symbolic reasoning to select the most suitable feature extractor.”
In addition to all of her innovative research contributions, Chandio is actively involved in improving the College of Engineering community; she recently received the college Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for her efforts. (September 2024)