BIOE Seminar Series: Founder Professor & Director Jim Rehg

AI Foundation Models for Analyzing Biosignals from Wearables

Abstract: Approximately 90% of the annual $4.5 trillion cost of healthcare in the US is attributable to chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, which are inextricably linked to mutable health behaviors. A key step in the prevention and management of chronic disease is the use of biosignals collected passively from wearables (such as smart watches and rings) to provide biomarkers for important health states and metrics, such as levels of stress and physical activity in daily life. The broad adoption of wearables and the increasing use of AI chatbots for patient-guided health decision-making has created new opportunities for longitudinal modeling of disease risk and the development of novel approaches to sensing and intervention.

Biography: James M. Rehg is a Founder Professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at UIUC, where he is the Director of the Health Care Engineering Systems Center. He received his Ph.D. from CMU in 1995 and worked at the Cambridge Research Lab of DEC (and then Compaq) from 1995-2001, where he managed the computer vision research group. He was a professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech from 2001-2022. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2001 and a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship from Georgia Tech in 2005. He and his students have received best student paper awards at ICML 2005, BMVC 2010 and 2022, Face and Gesture 2015, ACM IMWUT 2017, and a Method of the Year Award from the journal Nature Methods. Dr. Rehg served as the Program co-Chair for ACCV 2012 and CVPR 2017 and General co-Chair for CVPR 2009. He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 30 issued US patents. His research interests include AI, computer vision, and mobile and computational health (https://rehg.org).