We are thrilled to announce that previous MOSAIC lab member, John M. Templeton, Ph.D., has embarked on a new academic journey as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida! Congratulations Dr. Templeton!!

MOSAIC lab member presented at the 14th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM-BCB) held in Houston, Texas, in September 2023. As ACM-BCB brought together a host of professionals for the world’s leading interdisciplinary conference in the fields of bioinformatics, computational biology, and health informatics, our work titled “Beyond Motor Symptoms: Toward a Comprehensive Grading of Parkinson’s Disease Severity” spurred both interest and detailed discussions on the present landscape of Parkinson’s disease research, while outlining a vision for future explorations and applications in this vital area.

We are thrilled to announce that our research paper, “Pandemic Management – Health Data and Public Health Surveillance,” has been accepted as a poster presentation at the upcoming MedInfo 2023 conference, which will be held in Sydney, Australia, in July!

MOSAIC LAB Presents at The INFORMS Annual Meeting in Indianapolis. As INFORMS brings together over 6,000 people to the world’s largest Operations Research and Analytics conference, our work entitled “The Role of Digital Health Technology in Neurological Disease Staging” provided both interest and detailed discussion on the current state of healthcare while providing a vision for future research and applications in this arena.

The State of Florida has awarded multiple FIU schools more than $2 million to fund projects focused on educating and preparing students for careers in cybersecurity and information technology, including a project spearheaded by the MOSAIC Lab. These grants, funded by the Cybersecurity and Information Technology Pathways program, will help grow FIU-led programs meant to address the national skills shortage in cybersecurity and information technology by providing research, professional development for students, K-12 outreach, and upskilling public and nonprofit organizations.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, cybersecurity jobs are projected to grow 33 percent from 2020 to 2030, which is significantly faster than the average of all other occupations. The CyberSeek Cybersecurity Supply/Demand Heat Map indicates that there are currently over 700,000 total cybersecurity job openings in the U.S. alone, with Florida being the 4th state with the most job openings. The Cybersecurity and Information Technology Pathways (Cyber/IT Pathways) program is a joint endeavor of the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Cybersecurity (Cyber Florida) to inspire and prepare more students to pursue fulfilling and lucrative careers in cybersecurity/information technology (IT) while helping address the national skills shortage in these areas. 

“Project HaHa” (Hands-on Hardware Security Education), led by MOSAIC Lab director Chris Poellabauer, was awarded $1.2 million in funding. The project combines several universities and colleges in Florida – Florida International University (FIU), University of Florida (UF), University of South Florida (USF), Broward College (BC), Nova Southeastern University (NSU), and University of Tampa (UT) – with the goal of broadening and diversifying hardware security education to meet the increasing cybersecurity needs across the State and the nation. Project HaHa is unique because it relies on the low-cost, but highly integrated HaHa hardware board (developed by researchers at the University of Florida), and it focuses specifically on hands-on learning of hardware security concepts. The project focuses on four major activities: (1) approx. 50 instructors from various institutions will participate in professional development workshops for hardware security education; (2) these instructors will integrate HaHa modules into 11 existing and 5 new courses for hands-on hardware security training that will directly impact about 900 college students, 35% of whom are from underrepresented minorities; (3) these institutions will conduct broad outreach activities to promote hardware security in other Florida colleges and increase interest of cybersecurity in K-12 communities; and (4) this project will include a comprehensive evaluation to measure its success. The official announcement can be found here: https://news.fiu.edu/2022/fiu-awarded-over-2-million-for-cybersecurity-programs.

As of August 2021, Prof. Christian Poellabauer has joined the faculty of the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences and the Mobile Computing Lab (M-Lab) at the University of Notre Dame is now the MOSAIC (Mobile Sensing and Analytics) Lab at FIU! Follow these pages to learn about continuing and new projects in the area of opportunistic and participatory sensing, smart health applications, sensor data analytics, mobile-based interventions, and many other topics!

The COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for everyone, especially those in high-risk populations. Due to state-wide stay-at-home mandates, it was especially difficult for individuals with Parkinson’s Disease. Although the COVID-19 stay-at-home mandate was intended to help protect individuals at high-risk from coming into contact with the virus, it also prevented individuals with PD from receiving recommended structured and supervised exercise interventions. The presented work was completed to aid in understanding the consequences of these stay-at-home mandates. As a result of a 4-month restriction from these structured intervention programs, significant negative effects of individuals’ social well-being and across functional abilities of motor and speech function occurred. 82.14% of individuals self-reported having at least one symptom that worsened moderately or severely during the time of the stay-at-home mandates.  Tablet-based testing showed average completion times of functional tasks increased by a factor of 2.1x, while accuracy metrics showed overall degradation. As scientific and technological advances are made, in addition to the possibility of future global pandemics, a strong focus should be placed on maintaining recommended and beneficial programs for these at-risk populations.

Link: Negative Effects of COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Mandates on Physical Intervention Outcomes

The Best Paper Award was received by John Templeton, Christian Poellabauer, and Sandra Schneider for their paper entitled ‘Design Of A Mobile-Based Neurological Assessment Tool For Aging Populations’ as part of EAI MobiHealth 2020. This paper assesses the usability of a neurocognitive assessment application by individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and proposes a design that focuses on the user interface, specifically on testing instructions, layouts, and subsequent user interactions.