About Me

I lead the Digital Traces Lab at the Aalto University Department of Computer Science where I am a tenured University Lecturer. Until March 2023 I was also the department’s Vice Head for Diversity where I founded and led the departmental committee on Equality, diversity, and inclusion. Until the end of 2020, I was a James S. McDonnell (JSMF) Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). There, I was a member of The Social Dynamics and Well-Being (SocWeB) Lab, where I worked with Prof. Munmun De Choudhury and her team. Before that, I was a JSMF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Helsinki, where I worked with Prof. Erkki Isometsä. Prior to that, I did a short-term postdoctoral work at the Department of Computer Science at Aalto University, where I also completed my Ph.D. (with distinction) in December 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Jari Saramäki. My doctoral thesis “Temporal Patterns in Human Behavior” can be found here. In conjunction with that, I completed the European Insititute of Technology (EIT) Digital doctoral program where I got training and experience on entrepreneurship and how to turn research work into products.

My interests are extremely interdisciplinary. Most of my research work focuses on analyzing data generated by digital devices and platforms (such as smartphones and social media) to understand the behavioral patterns of their users. My work is at the intersection of multimodal sensing, behavioral data analysis, and ubiquitous computing. I design and run multimodal, longitudinal studies where data is collected from people in their natural life settings as they use and engage with consumer devices and online platforms. In my work, I leverage artificial intelligence and statistical learning methods to extract behavioral patterns from digital traces that people leave behind and turn them into insights about their health and well-being. My work appears in conferences such as The Web Conference, ICWSM, and CHI, as well as journals such as JMIR, JAMIA, and npj Digital Medicine. From time to time, my research work is picked up by the press nationally and internationally.

I was the ICWSM-2021 Social Media & Publicity Chair and served as Local & Social Chair for ICWSM-2020. I am a program commmittee meneber of The Web Conference 2023 and the Internation Conference on Computational Social Sceinece (IC2S2) 2023.