VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Varun Mishra 0001
dblp:74/10105-1
· DBLP profile ↗
12ranked-venue papers
1as first author
9since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-3891-5460ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 8 · 8 since 2021Computer networks · 2 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 1 first-author
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Exploring the Future of AI in Clinical Collaboration: A Study on Tumor Board Case PreparationabstractMultidisciplinary tumor boards (MTBs) bring specialists together to identify therapies for complex cancer cases, but preparing for them is time-intensive. Clinicians must extract key details from extensive records and evaluate treatment options. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in medicine for basic tasks like summarizing notes, little is known about their role in high-stakes tasks like MTB preparation. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 16 oncologists using two AI systems to prepare patient cases for MTB: an off-the-shelf assistant (Copilot) and a task-specific multi-agent system (Healthcare Agent Orchestrator, HAO). We analyzed oncologist prompts, AI responses, and oncologists’ perception of AI. Participants showed greater willingness to adopt HAO but were often overconfident in AI summaries and skeptical of AI-recommended therapies. Trust calibration strategies, such as source links and agent-trajectories, failed to align trust with system capabilities. We conclude with how AI systems should be built to support clinicians in high-stakes tasks. Amanda K. Hall, Ruican Rachel Zhong, Selin S. Everett, Alyssa Unell, Matthias Blondeel, Jonathan Carlson, Katie Claveau, Thulasee Jose, Tristan Naumann, David C. Rhew, Naiteek Sangani, Frank Tuan, James Weinstein, Varun Mishra 0001, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, T. Scott Saponas, Leonardo Schettini, J. Samuel Preston, Yu Gu 0017, Naoto Usuyama, Zelalem Gero, Cliff Wong, Noel Codella, Hoifung Poon, Shrey Jain, Matthew P. Lungren, Eric Horvitz |
CHI | 16 |
| 2026 | Exploring Collaboration Breakdowns Between Provider Teams and Patients in Post-Surgery CareabstractPost-surgery care involves ongoing collaboration between provider teams and patients, which starts from post-surgery hospitalization through home recovery after discharge. While prior HCI research has primarily examined patients' challenges at home, less is known about how provider teams coordinate discharge preparation and care handoffs, and how breakdowns in communication and care pathways may affect patient recovery. To investigate this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 healthcare providers and 4 patients in the context of gastrointestinal (GI) surgery. We found coordination boundaries between in- and out-patient teams, coupled with complex organizational structures within teams, impeded the "invisible work" of preparing patients' home care plans and triaging patient information. For patients, these breakdowns resulted in inadequate preparation for home transition and fragmented self-collected data, both of which undermine timely clinical decision-making. Based on these findings, we outline design opportunities to formalize task ownership and handoffs, contextualize co-temporal signals, and align care plans with home resources. Bingsheng Yao, Menglin Zhao, Zhan Zhang 0008, Pengqi Wang, Emma G. Chester, Changchang Yin, Tianshi Li 0001, Varun Mishra 0001, Lace M. K. Padilla, Odysseas Chatzipanagiotou, Timothy Pawlik, Ping Zhang 0016, Weidan Cao, Dakuo Wang |
CHI | 8 |
| 2026 | MIND: Empowering Mental Health Clinicians with Multimodal Data Insights through a Narrative DashboardabstractAdvances in data collection enable the capture of rich patient-generated data: from passive sensing (e.g., wearables and smartphones) to active self-reports (e.g., cross-sectional surveys and ecological momentary assessments). Although prior research has demonstrated the utility of patient-generated data in mental healthcare, significant challenges remain in effectively presenting these data streams along with clinical data (e.g., clinical notes) for clinical decision-making. Through co-design sessions with five clinicians, we propose MIND, a large language model-powered dashboard designed to present clinically relevant multimodal data insights for mental healthcare. MIND presents multimodal insights through narrative text, complemented by charts communicating underlying data. Our user study (N=16) demonstrates that clinicians perceive MIND as a significant improvement over baseline methods, reporting improved performance to reveal hidden and clinically relevant data insights (p<.001) and support their decision-making (p=.004). Grounded in the study results, we discuss future research opportunities to integrate data narratives in broader clinical practices. Ruishi Zou, Margaret E. Morris, Jihan Ryu, Timothy D. Becker, Nicholas Allen, Anne Marie Albano, Randy Auerbach, Daniel A. Adler, Varun Mishra 0001, Lace M. K. Padilla, Dakuo Wang, Ryan Sultan, Xuhai Xu |
CHI | 10 |
| 2025 | Feasibility and Utility of Multimodal Micro Ecological Momentary Assessment on a SmartwatchabstractEMA systems. Ha Le, Veronika Potter, Rithika Lakshminarayanan, Varun Mishra 0001, Stephen S. Intille |
CHI | 4 |
| 2025 | AI on My Shoulder: Supporting Emotional Labor in Front-Office Roles with an LLM-based Empathetic CoworkerabstractClient-Service Representatives (CSRs) are vital to organizations.Frequent interactions with disgruntled clients, however, disrupt their mental well-being.To help CSRs regulate their emotions while interacting with uncivil clients, we designed Care-Pilot, an LLM-powered assistant, and evaluated its efficacy, perception, and use.Our comparative analyses between 665 human and Care-Pilotgenerated support messages highlight Care-Pilot's ability to adapt to and demonstrate empathy in various incivility incidents.Additionally, 143 CSRs assessed Care-Pilot's empathy as more sincere and actionable than human messages.Finally, we interviewed 20 CSRs who interacted with Care-Pilot in a simulation exercise.They reported that Care-Pilot helped them avoid negative thinking, recenter thoughts, and humanize clients; showing potential for bridging gaps in coworker support.Yet, they also noted deployment challenges and emphasized the indispensability of shared experiences.We discuss future designs and societal implications of AI-mediated emotional labor, underscoring empathy as a critical function for AI assistants for worker mental health. Vedant Das Swain, Qiuyue Joy Zhong, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Yechan Jeon, Roy Zimmermann, Mary Czerwinski, Jina Suh, Varun Mishra 0001, Koustuv Saha, Javier Hernandez |
CHI | 8 |
| 2025 | CardioAI: A Multimodal AI-based System to Support Symptom Monitoring and Risk Prediction of Cancer Treatment-Induced CardiotoxicityabstractDespite recent advances in cancer treatments that prolong patients' lives, treatment-induced cardiotoxicity (i.e., the various heart damages caused by cancer treatments) emerges as one major side effect. The clinical decision-making process of cardiotoxicity is challenging, as early symptoms may happen in non-clinical settings and are too subtle to be noticed until life-threatening events occur at a later stage; clinicians already have a high workload focusing on the cancer treatment, no additional effort to spare on the cardiotoxicity side effect. Our project starts with a participatory design study with 11 clinicians to understand their decision-making practices and their feedback on an initial design of an AI-based decision-support system. Based on their feedback, we then propose a multimodal AI system, CardioAI, that can integrate wearables data and voice assistant data to model a patient's cardiotoxicity risk to support clinicians' decision-making. We conclude our paper with a small-scale heuristic evaluation with four experts and the discussion of future design considerations. Weidan Cao, Shihan Fu, Bingsheng Yao, Changchang Yin, Varun Mishra 0001, Daniel Addison, Ping Zhang 0016, Dakuo Wang |
CHI | 7 |
| 2025 | 'Always Nice and Confident, Sometimes Wrong': Developer's Experiences Engaging Generative AI Chatbots Versus Human-Powered Q&A PlatformsabstractSoftware engineers have historically relied on human-powered Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow (SO) as coding aids. With the rise of generative AI, developers have started to adopt AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, in their software development process. Recognizing the potential parallels between human-powered Q&A platforms and AI-powered question-based chatbots, we investigate and compare how developers integrate this assistance into their real-world coding experiences by conducting a thematic analysis of 1700+ Reddit posts. Through a comparative study of SO and ChatGPT, we identified each platform's strengths, use cases, and barriers. Our findings suggest that ChatGPT offers fast, clear, comprehensive responses and fosters a more respectful environment than SO. However, concerns about ChatGPT's reliability stem from its overly confident tone and the absence of validation mechanisms like SO's voting system. Based on these findings, we synthesized the design implications for future GenAI code assistants and recommend a workflow leveraging each platform's unique features to improve developer experiences. Elizabeth D. Mynatt, Varun Mishra 0001, Jonathan Bell 0001 |
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. | 3 |
| 2024 | SeSaMe: A Framework to Simulate Self-Reported Ground Truth for Mental Health Sensing StudiesabstractAdvances in mobile and wearable technologies have enabled the potential to passively monitor a person's mental, behavioral, and affective health. These approaches typically rely on longitudinal self-reported outcomes, e.g., depression, stress, and anxiety, to train machine learning models. However, the continuous need to self-report various internal states adds a significant burden on the participants, often resulting in attrition, missing labels, or insincere responses. In this work, we introduce the Scale Scores Simulation using Mental Models (SeSaMe) framework to alleviate participants' burden in digital mental health studies. By leveraging pre-trained large language models (LLMs), SeSaMe enables the simulation of participants' responses on psychological scales. In SeSaMe, researchers can prompt LLMs with information on participants' internal behav-ioral dispositions, enabling LLMs to construct mental models of participants to simulate their responses on psychological scales. As part of the framework, we provide four evaluation metrics to assess the effectiveness of the simulated responses. We demonstrate an application of SeSaMe, where we use GPT-4 to simulate responses on one scale using responses from another as behavioral information. We use SeSaMe's evaluation metrics to assess the alignment between human and SeSaMe-simulated responses to psychological scales. Then, we present multiple experiments to inspect the utility of SeSaMe-simulated responses as ground truth in training machine-learning models by replicating established depression and anxiety screening tasks with passive sensing data from a previous study. Our results indicate SeSaMe to be a promising approach, but its alignment may vary across scales and specific prediction objectives. We also observed that model performance with simulated data was on par with using the real data for training in most evaluation scenarios. We conclude by discussing the potential implications of SeSaMe in addressing some challenges with ground-truth collection in passive sensing studies. Akshat Choube, Vedant Das Swain, Varun Mishra 0001 |
ACII | 3 |
| 2024 | SOSW: Stress Sensing With Off-the-Shelf Smartwatches in the WildabstractRecent advances in wearable technology have led to the development of various methods for stress sensing in both controlled laboratory and real-life environments. However, existing methods often rely on specialized or expensive sensors that may not be easily accessible to the general population. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of using off-the-shelf smartwatches for stress detection in real-life scenarios. To achieve this, we propose SOSW, a comprehensive methodology for robust sensor data processing by considering both physiological and contextual data. SOSW employs a two-layer machine learning (ML) architecture. The first-layer ML model is trained and validated using carefully collected data under controlled laboratory conditions. The second-layer ML model is trained and validated using data collected in real-life settings. We conducted evaluations with 26 and 18 participants in controlled laboratory and real-life conditions, respectively. The results indicate that our methodology can successfully detect stressful events with an F-1 score of up to 0.84 in laboratory conditions and 0.71 in real-life scenarios using off-the-shelf smartwatches. The results are comparable to those achieved by the state of the art methods that rely on dedicated wearables. Kobiljon Toshnazarov, Uichin Lee, Byung Hyung Kim, Varun Mishra 0001, Lismer Andres Caceres Najarro, Youngtae Noh |
IEEE Internet Things J. | 4 |
| 2020 | Continuous Detection of Physiological Stress with Commodity HardwareabstractTimely detection of an individual’s stress level has the potential to improve stress management, thereby reducing the risk of adverse health consequences that may arise due to mismanagement of stress. Recent advances in wearable sensing have resulted in multiple approaches to detect and monitor stress with varying levels of accuracy. The most accurate methods, however, rely on clinical-grade sensors to measure physiological signals; they are often bulky, custom made, and expensive, hence limiting their adoption by researchers and the general public. In this article, we explore the viability of commercially available off-the-shelf sensors for stress monitoring. The idea is to be able to use cheap, nonclinical sensors to capture physiological signals and make inferences about the wearer’s stress level based on that data. We describe a system involving a popular off-the-shelf heart rate monitor, the Polar H7; we evaluated our system with 26 participants in both a controlled lab setting with three well-validated stress-inducing stimuli and in free-living field conditions. Our analysis shows that using the off-the-shelf sensor alone, we were able to detect stressful events with an F 1-score of up to 0.87 in the lab and 0.66 in the field, on par with clinical-grade sensors. Varun Mishra 0001, Gunnar Pope, Sarah E. Lord, Stephanie Lewia, Byron Lowens, Kelly Caine, Sougata Sen, Ryan J. Halter, David Kotz |
ACM Trans. Comput. Heal. | 1 |
| 2019 | Experience: Design, Development and Evaluation of a Wearable Device for mHealth ApplicationsabstractWrist-worn devices hold great potential as a platform for mobile health (mHealth) applications because they comprise a familiar, convenient form factor and can embed sensors in proximity to the human body. Despite this potential, however, they are severely limited in battery life, storage, bandwidth, computing power, and screen size. In this paper, we describe the experience of the research and development team designing, implementing and evaluating Amulet? an open-hardware, open-software wrist-worn computing device? and its experience using Amulet to deploy mHealth apps in the field. In the past five years the team conducted 11 studies in the lab and in the field, involving 204 participants and collecting over 77,780 hours of sensor data. We describe the technical issues the team encountered and the lessons they learned, and conclude with a set of recommendations. We anticipate the experience described herein will be useful for the development of other research-oriented computing platforms. It should also be useful for researchers interested in developing and deploying mHealth applications, whether with the Amulet system or with other wearable platforms. George Boateng, Vivian Motti 0001, Varun Mishra 0001, John A. Batsis, Josiah D. Hester, David Kotz |
MobiCom | 3 |
| 2018 | An ultra-low resource wearable EDA sensor using wavelet compressionabstractThis study presents an ultra-low resource platform for physiological sensing that uses on-chip wavelet compression to enable long-term recording of electrodermal activity (EDA) within a 64kB microcontroller. The design is implemented on a wearable platform and provides improvements in size and power compared to existing wearable technologies and was used in a lab setting to monitor EDA of 27 participants throughout a stress induction protocol. We demonstrate the device's sensitivity to stress induction by providing descriptive statistics of 8 common EDA signal features for each stressor of the experiment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a generic, 16-bit microcontroller (MCU) has been used to record real-time physiological signals on a wearable platform without the use of external memory chips or wireless transmission for extended periods of time. The compression techniques described can lead to reductions in size, power, and cost of wearable biosensors with little or no modifications to existing sensor hardware and could be valuable for applications interested in monitoring long-term physiological trends at lower data rates and memory requirements. Gunnar Pope, Varun Mishra 0001, Stephanie Lewia, Byron Lowens, David Kotz, Sarah E. Lord, Ryan J. Halter |
BSN | 2 |