Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City where she founded the Health Tech Hub in the Jacobs Institute and the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech. She holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder's Chair and is an Associate Dean. Her current research focus is at the intersection of small data, personalization, and privacy. Much of her prior work focused on leveraging the pervasiveness of mobile devices and digital interactions for health and life management (TEDMED). Estrin co-founded the non-profit startup, Open mHealth and served on several scientific advisory boards for early stage mobile health startups. She recently began as a part-time Amazon Scholar.
Previously, Estrin was on the UCLA faculty where she was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world. Her honors include: ACM Athena Lecture (2006), Anita Borg Institute's Women of Vision Award for Innovation (2007), The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), The National Academy of Engineering (2009), The IEEE Internet Award (2017), and most recently A MacArthur Fellow (2018).
Current research collaborators include: Helen Nissenbaum, Jason Waterman, JP Pollak, Mor Naaman, Nate Foster, Nicki Dell, Tanzeem Choudhury, Vitaly Shmatikov
Projects
- Small Data
- Immersive Recommendations
- Health Tech Hub
- Open mHealth
Small Data are the myriad of data traces we each generate everyday. Unfortunately, that data is often unavailable to us in a form that we can make sense of or act upon. Imagine a special kind of app running in the cloud that privately and securely turns your small data into big insights
We explore a personalization approach in which individuals actively harness their own digital traces. We focus in particular on algorithms, systems, and rich user interactions that make personalization both immersive--through the use of diverse data sources--and intentional--through transparency and user-modeling inputs that allow the end user to amplify their aspirational-behaviors relative to historically-observed behaviors.
Spring 2018 Teaching:
INFO5555 Health Tech, Data, Systems
CS5450 Networks and Distributed Computing, with Vitaly Shmatikov
We launched a Masters of Science program in Health Tech in Fall 2015 and are accepting applications for Fall 2018.
Our NSF funded research project with Cornell Information Sciences in Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical College is developing new ways of measuring, and ultimately managing, pain (NSF Painless). NSF Painless project is funded by National Science Foundation Award 1344587.
Open mHealth works with clinical experts and app and device developers to make digital health data as useful and actionable as possible. The open API platform gives developers a way to easily produce, access and integrate clinically meaningful and actionable data. Open mHealth builds products designed to support collaborative, connected, personalized care, that demonstrate the power of our open platform.
The small data lab has built an open source, open mhealth compliant system to support rapid prototyping and small scale pilots. such as the NSF Painless project mentioned above. The software itself is available open source and described here (ohmage-omh).