Aven Samareh

Aven is a PhD student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Washington under supervision of Professor Shuai Huang.  Her primary research interests are in the areas of machine learning and data fusion with a focus on dictionary learning; computer vision and social signal processing, with a focus on applications of these methods to healthcare such as Alzheimers disease, depression and surgical side infection. She is exploring a generic framework to personalize the model based on individual’s characteristics implicitly embedded in multivariate longitudinal measurements, and big data in health-care.  More specifically, Aven is working on a framework that exploits the monotonic progression patterns of the target degenerative disease conditions such as the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and articulate these patterns with a systematic optimization formulation. She is also experienced in using multiple biomarker modalities (audio, video, and text) for emotion severity assessment.

Aven enjoys working with medical professionals to translate and formulate healthcare problems. She is hoping to build effective monitoring algorithms to monitor degenerative patient conditions which is crucial for many clinical decision-making problems.