Technology Review magazine has named computer science professor Tanzeem Choudhury to the TR35, the publication's annual list of the top young innovators under 35, announced in the publication's September/October issue. The award honors Choudhury for her work in detecting, modeling and analyzing human activities and social interaction.
Choudhury and the other honorees were recognized in an awards ceremony on Wednesday and presented their research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week.
Technology Review chooses its innovators based on anonymous nominations, research papers submitted by the nominees about their research accomplishments and three letters of recommendation.
A common link between the innovators, Choudhury said, is that they have worked outside the norms of their academic community by bringing a new approach or insight from another discipline to their research.
In her own work, Choudhury hopes to improve the technology people interact with on a daily basis by answering basic sociological and psychological questions about behavior, she said.
Most of her research relies on data acquired by asking questions, having a human observer or coding human behavior, which limits the depth of the analysis.
"You can't just give a human coder to analyze thousands of hours of data to thousands of people," Choudhury said. "That's when I started to look at -- how you can use these tools to actually understand and delve into the workings of human behavior at a much more detailed or micro level."
Prasad Jayanti, chair of Dartmouth's computer science department, said that while computer science originally served scientists and engineers, research like Choudhury's incorporates knowledge of how social networks develop and how people interact with each other.
"[The TR35 is] very selective and very prestigious, and it doesn't happen unless the broad body of people really believe your research will have an impact on the world and society," Jayanti said. "[Choudhury] represents a new area of research, new in the world and a newer dimension to our department."
Choudhury said one of the challenges of her research is representing the variations of real life on a global scale.
"You and I might do the same activity as simple as walking differently, or I might be talking in a loud cafe versus in a quiet classroom," she said. "To handle those variations, we have to do experiments in the real world and make sure that the underlying technology can actually be robust and reliable."
Instead of outfitting a thousand people with a special purpose hardware, products as common as iPhones can be used for research on a greater scale, Choudhury said. Many commercial hardware products like cell phones already include sensors necessary for data collection such as accelerometers, GPS and microphones.
"If you can put these devices in people's hands, they'll carry it into everyday life," Choudhury said.
This accessibility will allow researchers to understand behavior across a wide spectrum of people. They can then adapt technology that is more responsive and interacts with humans in a more natural way, Choudhury said.
Dartmouth has been a beneficial work environment, she said, because of its openness towards interdisciplinary work. Her research uses insight from the social sciences and cognitive sciences to ultimately look at how a computer application might evolve, she added.
According to Choudhury, computer science is an evolving discipline as it connects to the problems of society on a broader scale.
"The scope of computer sciences is changing, and hopefully that's something we can push at Dartmouth," Choudhury says. "I'm interested in pursuing more women to think about computer science differently and hopefully create more opportunities that are appealing to women."
