Getting Started with the Research Group
Being new to Northeastern, my goal is to build up a vibrant team of committed students and staff at all levels who work collaboratively on exciting, imporant, and fun research in health technologies. Eventually the group will have students in both the technical domains and health domains creatively working together and learning from one another.
If you are interested in participating in my group’s research, either as a volunteer or (eventually) in a paid position, here's what you should do.
Step 1: Send me your name, email, and resume and I will put you on a mailing list I maintain of people interested in the group. (...@neu.edu)
Step 2: Attend our weekly open informational and brainstorming meetings Wednesdays at 10 AM in room 166 West Village H on Northeastern's campus. This is your chance to meet others working in the group (or thinking about it) and to start to contribute. If you have a permanent conflict with the meeting every week, let me know and we'll make other arrangements.
Step 3: Identify a particular project to dive in on and get your feet wet. If you attend meetings for a while, you might talk with existing students/staff and, when the opportunity comes up, volunteer to do something for them that will help with a research project. Alternatively, for a faster jump-start, we have outlined some getting-started projects below. Pick your general project area of interest and complete one of the projects that we've listed. This will demonstrate your commitment and abilities and make it easier for other group members to spend time mentoring you to get you more involved with their projects. Always remember that time is the scarcest resource of everyone in the group!
Health students: I will be adding projects to this list soon for students who do not have programming experience but want to get involved as well.
Getting Started Projects
I will keep this list updated as new "getting started" project ideas are developed.
Wockets: Population scale measurement of physical activity using wearable accelerometers and activity recognition. Platform: Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, soon Android phones.
Project 1: Write a self-report activity tracker app for the phone. This project will demonstrate that you have basic Windows Mobile development skills adequate to work on other aspects of the project. We may also use your code in planned experiments.
CITY: Android persuasive mobile app designed to help 18-35 year-olds lose weight and maintain weight loss for two years using phone's sensor capabilities. Platform: Android phones.
Project 1: Write a self-report mid-level food tracker app for the phone. This project will demonstrate that you have basic Android development skills adequate to work on other aspects of the project. We may also use your code in planned experiments.
Project 2: Write a self-report exhaustive food tracker app for the phone. This project will demonstrate that you have basic Android development skills adequate to work on other aspects of the project. We may also use your code in planned experiments.
Boxlab: Data collection from ubiquitous home sensor system. Platform: C#; any languages that can be used for writing scripts to manage datasets.
Project 1: Write code to compute inter-rater reliability statistics. This project will demonstrate that you can read certain Boxlab data files and compute useful statistics from those files that can be used by researchers using the datasets.
Project 2: Write scripts/code to compute information about Boxlab data by scanning Boxlab datasets. This project will demonstrate that you can write helpful programs that help researchers using the data by flagging when sensor data is missing, low-quality, etc.
Nutrition Games with a Purpose: Help use games to acquire food/nutrition databases. Platform: SQL; Java, Flash, Javascript, or .Net.
Project 1: Write a "game" to populate a database with nutrition info. This project will demonstrate that you can setup a database and have a program in Java, Javascript, or Flash enter and retrieve data from it.
Detecting Smoking Behavior: Create a mobile phone system using Wockets that can detect smoking behaviors. Platform: Windows Mobile/C# (eventually Android)
For a startup project, see the Wockets startup project above.
Others
I am also open to supervising students on projects of their own creation that use some of the group's technology or take the group in new and interesting directions in health technology. However, in most cases, these projects would need to be undertaken as volunteers or as an independent study course.
One last note regarding funding. I have limited funding for paid positions, and that funding will always be changing based on what is happening with projects and grants (see my job listings page). If you are interested in a funded position, your best bet is to get involved as a volunteer and demonstrate your initiative, enthusaism, and abilities. If you do, when paid spots do become available you will be more likely to be able to get them if you are already an active contributor to the group, familiar with our research, and (ideally) doing research of your own.
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