Mehdi Boukhechba

Prof. Dr. Mehdi Boukhechba

Engineering Systems and Environnement, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

12Years (2015-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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5 April 2023 in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
GDGuimin Dong
Guimin Dong
MTMingyue Tang
Mingyue Tang
ZWZhiyuan Wang
Zhiyuan Wang
JGJiechao Gao
Jiechao Gao
SGSikun Guo
Sikun Guo
Mehdi BoukhechbaMehdi Boukhechba
Mehdi Boukhechba
The Internet of Things (IoT) boom has revolutionized almost every corner of people’s daily lives: healthcare, environment, transportation, manufacturing, supply chain, and so on. With the recent development of sensor and communication technology, IoT artifacts, including smart wearables, cameras, smartwatches, and autonomous systems can accurately measure and perceive their surrounding environment. Continuous sensing generates massive amounts of data and presents challenges for machine learning. Deep learning models (e.g., convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks) have been extensively employed in solving IoT tasks by learning patterns from multi-modal sensory data. Graph neural networks (GNNs), an emerging and fast-growing family of neural network models, can capture complex interactions within sensor topology and have been demonstrated to achieve state-of-the-art results in numerous IoT learning tasks. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in the application of GNNs to the IoT field, including a deep dive analysis of GNN design in various IoT sensing environments, an overarching list of public data and source codes from the collected publications, and future research directions. To keep track of newly published works, we collect representative papers and their open-source implementations and create a Github repository at GNN4IoT.

4 July 2018 in JMIR Mental Health
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
Mehdi BoukhechbaMehdi Boukhechba
Mehdi Boukhechba
PCPhilip Chow
Philip Chow
KFKarl Fua
Karl Fua
BTBethany A Teachman
Bethany A Teachman
LBLaura Barnes
Laura Barnes
Background: Social anxiety is highly prevalent among college students. Current methodologies for detecting symptoms are based on client self-report in traditional clinical settings. Self-report is subject to recall bias, while visiting a clinic requires a high level of motivation. Assessment methods that use passively collected data hold promise for detecting social anxiety symptoms and supplementing self-report measures. Continuously collected location data may provide a fine-grained and ecologically valid way to assess social anxiety in situ. Objective: The objective of our study was to examine the feasibility of leveraging noninvasive mobile sensing technology to passively assess college students’ social anxiety levels. Specifically, we explored the different relationships between mobility and social anxiety to build a predictive model that assessed social anxiety from passively generated Global Positioning System (GPS) data. Methods: We recruited 228 undergraduate participants from a Southeast American university. Social anxiety symptoms were assessed using self-report instruments at a baseline laboratory session. An app installed on participants’ personal mobile phones passively sensed data from the GPS sensor for 2 weeks. The proposed framework supports longitudinal, dynamic tracking of college students to evaluate the relationship between their social anxiety and movement patterns in the college campus environment. We first extracted the following mobility features: (1) cumulative staying time at each different location, (2) the distribution of visits over time, (3) the entropy of locations, and (4) the frequency of transitions between locations. Next, we studied the correlation between these features and participants’ social anxiety scores to enhance the understanding of how students’ social anxiety levels are associated with their mobility. Finally, we used a neural network-based prediction method to predict social anxiety symptoms from the extracted daily mobility features. Results: Several mobility features correlated with social anxiety levels. Location entropy was negatively associated with social anxiety (during weekdays, r=−0.67; and during weekends, r=−0.51). More (vs less) socially anxious students were found to avoid public areas and engage in less leisure activities during evenings and weekends, choosing instead to spend more time at home after school (4 pm-12 am). Our prediction method based on extracted mobility features from GPS trajectories successfully classified participants as high or low socially anxious with an accuracy of 85% and predicted their social anxiety score (on a scale of 0-80) with a root-mean-square error of 7.06. Conclusions: Results indicate that extracting and analyzing mobility features may help to reveal how social anxiety symptoms manifest in the daily lives of college students. Given the ubiquity of mobile phones in our society, understanding how to leverage passively sensed data has strong potential to address the growing needs for mental health monitoring and treatment.

22 March 2022 in IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ZWZhiyuan Wang
Zhiyuan Wang
HXHaoyi Xiong
Haoyi Xiong
JZJie Zhang
Jie Zhang
SYSijia Yang
Sijia Yang
Mehdi BoukhechbaMehdi Boukhechba
Mehdi Boukhechba
DDDejing Dou
Dejing Dou
Mobile sensing systems have been widely used as a practical approach to collect behavioral and health-related information from individuals and to provide timely intervention to promote health and well-being, such as mental health and chronic care. As the objectives of mobile sensing could be either personalized medicine for individuals or public health for populations, in this work we review the design of these mobile sensing systems, and propose to categorize the design of these systems in two paradigms – (i) Personal Sensing and (ii) Crowd Sensing paradigms. While both sensing paradigms might incorporate common ubiquitous sensing technologies, such as wearable sensors, mobility monitoring, mobile data offloading, and cloud-based data analytics to collect and process sensing data from individuals, we present two novel taxonomy systems based on the (a) Sensing Objectives (e.g., goals of mHealth sensing systems and how technologies achieve the goals), and (b) the Sensing Systems Design and Implementation (D&I) (e.g., designs of mHealth sensing systems and how technologies are implemented). With respect to the two paradigms and two taxonomy systems, this work systematically reviews this field. Specifically, we first present technical reviews on the mHealth sensing systems in eight common/popular healthcare issues, ranging from depression and anxiety to COVID-19. Through summarizing the mHealth sensing systems, we comprehensively survey the research works using the two taxonomy systems, where we systematically review the Sensing Objectives and Sensing Systems D&I while mapping the related research works onto the life-cycles of mHealth Sensing, i.e., (1) Sensing Task Creation & Participation, (2) Health Surveillance & Data Collection, and (3) Data Analysis & Knowledge Discovery. In addition to summarization, the proposed taxonomy systems also help the potential directions of mobile sensing for health from both personalized medicine and population health perspectives. Finally, we attempt to test and discuss the validity of our scientific approaches to the survey.

1 February 2021 in IEEE Access
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
ATArash Tavakoli
Arash Tavakoli
SKShashwat Kumar
Shashwat Kumar
XGXiang Guo
Xiang Guo
VBVahid Balali
Vahid Balali
Mehdi BoukhechbaMehdi Boukhechba
Mehdi Boukhechba
AHArsalan Heydarian
Arsalan Heydarian
Effective shared autonomy requires a clear understanding of driver’s behavior, which is governed by multiple psychophysiological and environmental variables. Disentangling this intricate web of interactions requires understanding the driver’s state and behaviors in different real-world scenarios, longitudinally. Naturalistic Driving Studies (NDS) have shown to be an effective approach to understanding the driver’s state and behavior in real-world scenarios. However, due to the lack of technological and computing capabilities, former NDS only focused on vision-based approaches, ignoring important psychophysiological factors such as cognition and emotion. The main objective of this paper is to introduce HARMONY, a human-centered multimodal naturalistic driving study, where driver’s behaviors and states are monitored through (1) in-cabin and outside video streams (2) physiological signals including driver’s heart rate and hand acceleration (IMU data), (3) ambient noise, light, and the vehicle’s GPS location, and (4) music logs, including song features such as tempo. HARMONY is the first study that collects long-term naturalistic facial, physiological, and environmental data simultaneously. This paper summarizes HARMONY’s goals, framework design, data collection and analysis, and the on-going and future research efforts. Through a presented case study, we first demonstrate the importance of longitudinal driver state sensing through using Kernel Density Estimation Methods. Second, we leverage the application of Bayesian Change Point detection methods to demonstrate how we can identify driver behaviors and responses to the environmental conditions by fusing psychophysiological information with features extracted from video streams.

1 May 2018 in Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
SMSanjana Mendu
Sanjana Mendu
Mehdi BoukhechbaMehdi Boukhechba
Mehdi Boukhechba
JGJanna R. Gordon
Janna R. Gordon
DDDebajyoti Datta
Debajyoti Datta
EMEdwin Molina
Edwin Molina
LBLaura Barnes
Laura Barnes
Significant health disparities exist between Hispanics and the general US population, complicated in part by communication, literacy, and linguistic factors. There are few available Spanish-language interactive, technology-driven health education programs that engage patients who have a range of health literacy levels. We describe the development of an interactive virtual patient educator for educating and counseling Hispanic women about cervical cancer and human papillomavirus. Specifically, we describe the iterative design methodology and rationale, usability evaluation, and pilot testing of the system with Hispanic women in a rural community in Florida. The pilot study findings provide preliminary evidence of the feasibility of the proposed patient education approach. The proposed application and the lessons learned will prove beneficial for future work targeted towards different cultural populations.

1 June 2024 in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
JEJeremy W. Eberle
Jeremy W. Eberle
KDKatharine E. Daniel
Katharine E. Daniel
SBSonia Baee
Sonia Baee
ASAlexandra L. Silverman
Alexandra L. Silverman
ELElijah Lewis
Elijah Lewis
BTBethany A. Teachman
Bethany A. Teachman
Web-based cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I) can improve interpretation biases and anxiety symptoms but faces high rates of dropout. This study tested the effectiveness of web-based CBM-I relative to an active psychoeducation condition and the addition of low-intensity telecoaching for a subset of CBM-I participants. 1,234 anxious community adults (Mage = 35.09 years, 81.2% female, 72.1% white, 82.6% not Hispanic) were randomly assigned at Stage 1 of a sequential, multiple-assignment randomized trial to complete five weekly sessions of CBM-I or psychoeducation on our team's public research website. After the first session, for Stage 2, an algorithm attempted to classify CBM-I participants as higher (vs. lower) risk for dropping out; those classified as higher risk were then randomly assigned to complete four brief weekly telecoaching check-ins (vs. no coaching). As hypothesized (https://doi.org/j2xr; Daniel, Eberle, & Teachman, 2020), CBM-I significantly outperformed psychoeducation at improving positive and negative interpretation biases (Recognition Ratings, Brief Body Sensations Interpretation Questionnaire) and anxiety symptoms (Overall Anxiety Severity and Impairment Scale, Anxiety Scale from Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-Short Form), with smaller treatment gains remaining significant at 2-month follow-up. Unexpectedly, CBM-I had significantly worse treatment dropout outcomes than psychoeducation, and adding coaching (vs. no coaching) did not significantly improve efficacy or dropout outcomes (notably, many participants chose not to interact with their coach). Web-based CBM-I appears effective, but supplemental coaching may not mitigate the challenge of dropout. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).