Monday, November 10, 2025 – 2:00 pm CT
Walter Dempsey, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Harvard University
About the Webinar:
For mobile health (mHealth) interventions targeting habitual behavior, effectiveness often hinges on delivering support shortly before the target behavior is likely to occur (e.g., medication reminders that must precede meal intake). In these contexts, the current practice for just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) and optimization experiments is to schedule decision points at a fixed interval (e.g., one hour) before user-provided / forecasted behavior times, and the fixed interval is kept the same for all individuals. However, this one-size-fits-all approach performs poorly for individuals with irregular routines, often scheduling decision points after the target behavior has already started or occurred due to inaccurate forecasting.
In this talk, I will cover SigmaScheduling, our method to dynamically schedule decision points based on uncertainty in predicted behavior times. When behavior timing is more predictable, SigmaScheduling schedules decision points closer to the predicted behavior time; when timing is less certain, SigmaScheduling schedules decision points earlier, increasing the likelihood of timely intervention decisions.
About the Presenter:
Dr. Asim Gazi is a postdoctoral fellow in computer science and statistics at Harvard University, advised by Dr. Susan Murphy. He completed his PhD in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023, advised by Dr. Omer Inan and Dr. Christopher Rozell and funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He is currently funded by a NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and was previously supported by Schmidt Science Fellows, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, as one of 32 Schmidt Science Fellows selected from around the world in 2023.. More about Asim Gazi.
