About Me

I am an assistant professor in the Computer Science program in the Dhanani School of Science and Engineering at Habib university. As a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, I completed my MS and PhD in Computer Science (Human Computer Interaction) from Virginia Tech, where I was advised by Dr. Scott McCrickard, and co-advised by Dr. Aisling Kelliher. In my doctoral research, I used and adapted a variety of qualitative research methods to investigate parents’ use of technology as a care-giving tool to design interactive media for young children based on parents’ context of use and sought gratifications. I also explored the potential of using screen and voice-based interfaces to facilitate young children’s secondary language learning.

Prior to my research trajectory at Virginia Tech, I investigated how disorientation occurs in various tech-centered activities in online and outdoor environments, and developed means to identify and resolve it to facilitate learning in different educational contexts. I have published work in IEEE and ACM conferences including Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Interaction Design and Children (IDC), International conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP), Human-Agent Interaction (HAI), and Interactive Media Experiences (IMX). My work on designing mobile applications to minimize disorientation in informal learning environments won an honorable mention award for short papers at ACM IDC 2021.

Research Interests

Research Areas: Parent-child Computer Interaction; technologies for families and children; participatory and ethnographic methods; distractions/disorientation; digital childcare assistants.

Methods: Surveys, interviews, probes, auto-ethnography, personas.