Welcome to the Smart Devices lab at Skidmore College, directed by
Dr. Aarathi Prasad, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science at Skidmore College.
Mission
Adoption of Internet-connected devices and applications struggle due to barriers such as privacy concerns, usability issues and lack of trust. We foster critical thinking around the use and non-use of Internet-connected devices and applications. The lab offers a challenging yet supportive environment that cultivates students' intellectual excellence outside the classroom to develop new research, technical, and collaborative skills and prepare them for both academic and professional careers.
Updates
- Sep 2023: The paper titled 'Anxiously attached: Personality predictors of privacy attitudes, trust, and willingness to share information on the internet' that I co-wrote with Joshua Hart and Timothy Stablein of Union College was published in the International Journal of Personality Psychology.
- Aug 2023: Cassie Davidson '25 and Maddy Fung '25 presented the research they worked on over the summer as a poster titled 'SkidTok: A Privacy-Centric Social Media App for Children' at Skidmore's Summer Faculty-Student Collaborative Research presentations.
- Aug 2023: Zander Chown '25 presented the research he worked on over the summer as a talk titled 'Securing Mobile Fertility App data using Multi-Party Computation' at Skidmore's Summer Faculty-Student Collaborative Research presentations.
- May 2023: Zander Chown '25 presented the research he and I have working on in the past academic year in a poster titled 'Defining Privacy Norms for Fertility Data' at Skidmore's Academic Festival 2023.
- March 2023: Zander Chown '25 has been awarded the 5-week faculty-student summer research scholarship, which will give him the opportunity to continue his research this summer. Congratulations!
- March 2023: Cassie Davidson '25 and Maddy Fung '25 have both been awarded the Schupf scholarship, which will give them the opportunity to do 10 week research this summer and also attend a conference of their choosing afterwards to present their work. Congratulations!
- September 2022: Dr. Prasad presented poster titled 'Understanding Student Perceptions Around Mandatory Use of Smartphone Apps
for COVID-19' at MobileHCI '22, in Vancouver, Canada
- July 2022: Dr. Prasad will be on the program committee for NetHealth 2022.
- June 2022: The article Dr. Prasad wrote with Aaliyah Lawrence '24, Zoe Bilodeau '23 and Prof. Sarah Sweeney titled 'Understanding Student Perceptions Around Mandatory Use of Smartphone Apps
for COVID-19' has been conditionally accepted to be published in the proceedings of MobileHCI '22 as late breaking work.
- April 2022: Zoe Beals '22 presented her senior thesis titled 'Exploring a goal-oriented approach for addressing problematic smartphone use'.
- April 2022: Zoe Beals '22 presented the poster at CCSCNE 2022, and Aaliyah Lawrence '24, Cassie Davidson '25 and Zander Chown '25 attended the conference.
- Mar 2022: Poster by Zoe Beals titled 'ScreenAware: an iOS App to Manage Problematic Smartphone Use' was accepted to be presented at CCSCNE 2022 and was selected as a finalist for the undergraduate research competition.
- September 2021: The article Dr. Prasad co-authored with Dr. Erica Wojcik, Samantha Hutchinson '20 and Kyla Shen '19 titled 'Children prefer to learn from smart devices, but do not trust them
more than humans' was published in the Journal on Child-Computer Interaction.
- September 2021: Dr. Prasad presented the paper 'Address-
ing Problematic Smartphone Use with a Personalized, Goal-based Approach.' at WellComp 2021 and the paper was published in the Adjunct proceedings of 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
- July 2021: The article Dr. Prasad co-authored with Dr. Lucas LaFreniere, Vaasu Taneja and Zoe Beals '22 titled 'Address-
ing Problematic Smartphone Use with a Personalized, Goal-based Approach.' was accepted to 2021 Ubicomp/ISWC workshop on Wellness Computing (WellComp)
- May 2021: Veronica Sih presented our paper titled 'COVID-Labels: Explainable and Trustwor-
thy Mechanisms for Rebuilding Businesses during the COVID-19 Pandemic' at the ACM CHI Towards Explainable and Trustworthy Autonomous
Physical Systems Workshop.
- July 2021: Dr. Prasad will be on the program committee for NetHealth 2022.
- Apr 2021: Vaasu Taneja will be starting a PhD in CS program at UAlbany in Fall 2022. Congratulations!
- Mar 2021: Matt Clark '20 will be starting a PhD in CS program at UVA in Fall 2022. Congratulations!
- Feb 2021: The article Dr. Prasad wrote with Veronica Sih titled 'COVID-Labels: Explainable and Trustwor-
thy Mechanisms for Rebuilding Businesses during the COVID-19 Pandemic' was accepted to the ACM CHI Towards Explainable and Trustworthy Autonomous
Physical Systems Workshop.
Listed below are the publications and ongoing submissions from research projects that I worked on after I started at Skidmore College in July 2017.
Designing tools to monitor problematic smartphone usage
- Aarathi Prasad, Lucas LaFreniere, Vaasu Taneja, *Zoe Beals. "Addressing problematic smartphone use with a personalized, goal-based approach". ACM Workshop on Computing for Wellbeing (WellComp). September 2021 pdf
- Aarathi Prasad, *Asia Quinones. Digital overload reminders - "the right amount of shame"?. In proceedings of HCI International. July 2020. pdf
Smart device usage at home
- Erica Wojcik, Aarathi Prasad, *Samantha Hutchinson and *Kyla Shen. Children prefer to learn from smart devices, but do not trust them more than humans. Journal on Child-Computer Interaction. pp 100406,
September 2021. doi: 10.1016/j.ijcci.2021.100406 pdf
- Aarathi Prasad, *Ruben Ruiz, Timothy Stablein. Understanding Parents' Concerns with Smart Device Usage in the Home. HCI for Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11594. July 2019. Springer, Cham. pdf
- *William Jang, *Adil Chhabra and Aarathi Prasad. Enabling Multi-user Controls in Smart Home Devices. In Proceedings of the Workshop on IoT Security and Privacy (IoTS&P). November 2017. pdf
Privacy and security
- *Zander Chown, Aarathi Prasad. Title excluded. In submission.
- Aarathi Prasad, *Zoe Bilodeau, *Aaliyah Lawrence, *Lucas Draper, Roberto Hoyle. Title excluded. In submission
- Aarathi Prasad, Joshua Hart, Timothy Stablein. Anxiously attached: Personality predictors of privacy attitudes, trust, and willingness to share information on the internet. Journal of Personality Psychology. September 2023. volume 9, pp 78-87, doi: 10.21827/ijpp.9.40940 pdf
- *Veronica Sih and Aarathi Prasad, COVID-Labels: Explainable and Trustworthy Mechanisms for Rebuilding Businesses during the COVID-19 Pandemic. CHI Towards Explainable and Trustworthy Autonomous Physical Systems Workshop. Presented in May 2021. pdf
- Aarathi Prasad, *Matthew Clark, *Ha Linh Nguyen, *Ruben Ruiz, *Emily Xiao. Analyzing privacy policies of mental health apps. International Conference on Health Informatics. February 2020. pdf
Mobile health
- Aarathi Prasad, *Aaliyah Lawrence, *Zoe Bilodeau and Sarah Sweeney.
Understanding student perceptions around mandatory use of smartphone apps
for COVID-19. In Adjunct Publication of the 24th International Conference
on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI
'22 Adjunct), September 28-October 1, 2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada. ACM,
New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. doi: 10.1145/3528575.3551439 pdf
- Aarathi Prasad, *Bryan McQuade, Casey Schofield. AR-Based Mobile Applications for Exposure Therapy. In HCI International 2018 Posters Extended Abstracts, Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 851. July 2018. Springer. pdf
Computer Science Education
- Christine Reilly and Aarathi Prasad. Including Computer Systems Assignments in Introductory Programming Courses. IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pp. 1-5. 2021. doi: 10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637341. pdf
- Tamara Peyton, Aarathi Prasad, Sa Liu, Joslenne Pena. Teaching Human-Centered Design in CS programs. Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. February 2019.
- Aarathi Prasad. Using an art museum field trip to spark classroom discussions about mobile app design. Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. February 2019. pdf
* denotes undergraduates
