Biography

Edison Thomaz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of The University of Texas at Austin, with an appointment in the School of Information. He holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the School of Interactive Computing of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a S.M. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab. Prior to his academic appointments, Dr. Thomaz held industry positions at leading technology companies such as Microsoft and France Telecom.

Edison's research is in Activiomics, a new discipline that applies computational methods towards sensing, recognizing and modeling the entire span of people's everyday life activities and context, from individual gestures to life patterns and routines. By enabling the measurement of human behaviors at a finely-grained level of detail and pairing them with bio-physiological signals obtained with environmental and wearable sensors, his work aims to provide a new technical foundation for applications and discoveries at the frontier of human health and behavior such as gene-environment interactions, predictive health from behavior markers, and personal health informatics.

Areas Of Specialization

Health Information Systems
Human-Computer Interaction

Recent Awards

• Best Short Paper with Irfan Essa Zhang and Gregory D. Abowd at the ACM IUI
• Best of CHI Award with Felicia Cordeiro, Daniel A. Epstein, Elizabeth Bales, Arvind K. Jagannathan, Gregory D. Abowd, and James Fogarty at the CHI

Recent Courses