Nediyana Daskalova

About me

I am a Research Scientist at Spotify in Boston. Before that, I completed my PhD in Computer Science, at Brown University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Jeff Huang, and I was a part of the Human-Computer Interaction research group. My research interests are in human-computer interaction and personal informatics with a special focus on sleep-tracking and self-experiments.

Updates

December 2021: Our paper with summer intern Savvas Petridis was accepted to IUI'22.
December 2020: The Self-E paper (the last chapter of my thesis!) was accepted to CHI 2021.
July 2020: I started as a Research Scientist at Spotify.
May 24, 2020: I graduated from my PhD.
April 9, 2020: I defended my thesis!

Research Projects

Self-E: a self-experimentation app that helps users optimize various aspects of their lives.

Website - Android App - iOS App

SleepBandits (a.k.a. SleepCoacher 2.0): a self-experimentation app that helps users optimize their sleep.

Website - Android App - iOS App

Publications

Self-E: Smartphone- Supported Guidance for Customizable Self-Experimentation.

Nediyana Daskalova, Eindra Kyi*, Kevin Ouyang*, Arthur Borem, Sally Chen, Sung Hyun Park, Nicole Nugent, and Jeff Huang. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021) PDF - Video

SleepBandits: Guided Flexible Self-Experiments for Sleep

Nediyana Daskalova, Jina Yoon, Lisa Wang, Cintia Araujo, Guillermo Beltran, Nicole Nugent, John McGeary, Joseph Jay Williams, Jeff Huang. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020) PDF - Video

Investigating the Effectiveness of Cohort-Based Sleep Recommendations

Nediyana Daskalova, Bongshin Lee, Jeff Huang, Chester Ni, Jessica Lundin. (Ubicomp 2018). PDF

Cohorts of Self-Experimenters: Lessons Learned from Personal Informatics Self-Experiments

Nediyana Daskalova, Karthik Desingh, Alexandra Papoutsaki, Diane Schulze, Heather Sha, and Jeff Huang. (Ubicomp 2017). PDF

"If a person is emailing you, it just doesn't make sense": Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email

Frank Bentley, Nediyana Daskalova, Nazanin Andalibi. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017). PDF

SleepCoacher: A Personalized Automated Self-Experimentation System for Sleep Recommendations

Nediyana Daskalova, Danae Metaxa-Kakavouli, Adrinne Tran, Nicole Nugent, Julie Boergers, John McGeary, and Jeff Huang. ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2016). PDF - Video - Source Code

Webgazer: Scalable webcam eyetracking using user interactions

Alexandra Papoutsaki, Patsorn Sangkloy, James Laskey, Nediyana Daskalova, Jeff Huang, and James Hays. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2016). PDF - Website

Informing Design of Suggestion and Self-Monitoring Tools through Participatory Experience Prototypes

Nediyana Daskalova, Nathalie Ford, Ann Hu, Kyle Moorehead, Ben Wagnon, and Janet Davis. The 9th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive 2014). PDF

Case Studies and Other Publications

HeyPillow: Computationally Guided Sleep Behavior Study Through Sensing

Nediyana Daskalova, Jiaju Ma, Tiffany Chen, Valerie Nguon, Jing Qian, Chonghui Chen and Jeff Huang. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2019). Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Health (WISH). Poster. Video

Personalized Behavior-Powered Systems for Guiding Self-Experiments

Nediyana Daskalova. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018). Doctoral Consortium. PDF

Comparing the Reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Survey Monkey to Traditional Market Research Surveys

Nediyana Daskalova, Brooke White. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017). Case Study. PDF

It's All About Coupons: Exploring Coupon Use Behaviors in Email

Nediyana Daskalova, Frank Bentley, Nazanin Andalibi. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017). Case Study. PDF

Awards and Scholarships

ACM-W Scholarship for attending UIST 2016

Best Aging in Place Hack at MIT's Grand Hack 2016 Article

CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop Scholarships 2015, 2016

Dropbox Scholarship for Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) 2013