Contact
Location
SW-19, Link Lab, Olsson Hall
151 Engineer's Way
Charlottesville, VA 22903
Website Google Scholar

About

I am working with Prof. Laura Barnes at the Sensing Systems for Health Lab (S²He). I am also affiliated with the Cyber-Physical Systems Link Lab.

At the S²He lab, I work on on-device sensing system development for understanding and detection of social interaction and context-aware micro-interventions for social anxiety. Besides, I am contributing to the system development for real-time cancer patient-clinician interaction. My developed on-device systems for smartwatches have been used for research projects in collaboration with the Dept. of Psychology and a project in collaboration with the Schools of Nursing and Medicine at UVA.

Selected Publications

WatchAnxiety: A Transfer Learning Approach for State Anxiety Prediction from Smartwatch Data. IEEE EMBS-BSN'25. Md Sabbir Ahmed, Noah French, Mark Rucker, Zhiyuan Wang, Taylor Myers-Brower, Kaitlyn Petz, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, Laura E. Barnes
A Minimalistic Approach to Predict and Understand the Relation of App Usage with Students' Academic Performance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 7, Issue MHCI. Md Sabbir Ahmed, Rahat Jahangir Rony, Mohammad Abdul Hadi, Ekram Hossain, Nova Ahmed
SocialPulse: An On-Smartwatch System for Detecting Real-World Social Interactions. ACM UbiComp'25 Demo. Md Sabbir Ahmed, Arafat Rahman, Mark Rucker, Laura E. Barnes
A Fast and Minimal System to Identify Depression Using Smartphones: Explainable Machine Learning–Based Approach. JMIR Formative Research. Md Sabbir Ahmed, Nova Ahmed

Awards

Provost's Fellowship (2023 - Present), UVA
NSF Student Travel Grant of $2000 to attend IEEE SmartComp'25 at UCC, Ireland.
NSF Student Travel Award of $795 to attend IEEE-EMBS BSN'25 at UCLA, USA.
Special recognitions for outstanding reviews for ACM CHI'24 and ACM IMWUT.
Gary Marsden Travel Award to participate at ACM MobileHCI’23, ACM SIGCHI.
Top 1% in European Alliance for Innovation, 2022.
Travel Grant from ACM SIGCHI Development Fund to attend Asian CHI'21.
Gary Marsden Travel Award to attend ACM CHI’21.

Featured Grants & Projects

Global Graduate Research Grant of $1500, CGII, University of Virginia.
Research Fund $7500 (2023-2028), University of Virginia. It is a part of the support package of the Provost's Fellowship.
Research Grant BDT 50,000, Eastern University, Bangladesh I was the co-researcher in the grant.