HumanSys was held at UCI as part of the CPS-IoT’25 week. The panel session focused on the challenges and future of human-centered sensing, cyber-physical systems, and human-in-the-loop AI for health and well-being.
Category: News
Two new papers accepted in HumanSys’25
Congratulations to Diana, Tyler, and Mahmoud for accepting their papers at HumanSys’25.
Papers are available:
- Diana Romero, Fatima Anwar, Salma Elmalaki, “MoCoMR: A Collaborative MR Simulator with Individual Behavior Modeling,” arXiv:2503.09874
- Mahmoud Srewa, Tianyu Zhao, Salma Elmalaki, “PluralLLM: Pluralistic Alignment in LLMs via Federated Learning,” arXiv:2503.09925
Salma organized a workshop during the 2025 NSF CPS PI meeting on Human-in-the-Loop CPS in the Era of Human-AI Alignment: Impact and Future Direction
This workshop addresses critical challenges in Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) by focusing on human-AI alignment. We will explore three key gaps: (1) Formalizing Alignment Concepts: Developing rigorous frameworks for defining and measuring crucial aspects like trustworthiness, transparency, explainability, fairness, and sustainability. (2) Limitations in Sociotechnical Approaches: Evaluating current sociotechnical methods and identifying their shortcomings in achieving effective human-AI collaboration. (3) Assessing Societal Impact: Analyzing the broad impact of advancements in human-AI collaboration on large-scale CPS. The workshop features invited talks from leading experts and a panel followed by interactive roundtable discussions designed to foster brainstorming and collaborative solutions. Join us in contributing to the future of aligned and beneficial human-AI integration in CPS.
https://cps-vo.org/group/cps-pimtg25/miniworkshops

Salma serves on the technical program committee for the 2025 NSF CPS PI meeting
The 2025 Cyber-Physical Systems Principal Investigators’ Meeting (CPS PI Meeting ’25) was held in person at Vanderbilt University’s Student Life Center (SLC) in Nashville.
Newly accepted paper (BehaVR) at PETS’25
In collaboration with Athina Markopoulou‘s group, our new work on user identification based on VR sensor data has been accepted to appear at the coming 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2025). Congrats to all the authors. Stay tuned for the proceedings!
Salma gives the closing ceremony speech for UCI VenusHack 2024 – UCI’s largest women-centric Hackathon
Congratulations, Mojtaba, for defending his PhD thesis!
Congratulations to Dr. Mojtaba Taherisadr (my first PhD student!) for successfully defending his thesis entitled “Methodologies for personalized privacy-aware ML in human-in-the-loop systems.” His thesis addresses the multi-fold challenges of personalized privacy-aware systems, namely adaptation, detection, mitigation, and control under inter- and intra-human variation. His thesis led to several publications, including IEEE IoT journal, IoTDI, ICCPS, ISQED, and IEEE Bio-Inspired Computing Newsletter.
Congratulations again, and good luck with your future endeavors!

Salma serves as a panelist in the International Workshop on Foundation Models for Cyber-Physical Systems & Internet of Things (FMSys)-Part of CPS-IoT’24 week
Congratulations “Biometric ADAS” undergrad team for winning the Dean Choice Award for Senior Design Project
Congratulations to Ismail, Citlali, and Rithvik.
Watch their cool video demonstration in our lab: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Z3tp3xweQ7wM1PkT7



New paper accepted at the Design Automation for CPS and IoT (DESTION’24). Congrats Yixin and Tyler!
Yixin Zhang (former undergrad researcher) and Tyler Zhao have a new paper accepted in DESTION’24 also part of the CPS-IoT’24 week.
The paper entitled “Towards Fairness-aware Crowd Management System and Surge Prevention in Smart Cities,” discusses crowd management methodologies that focus on fairness in terms of the disparity of evacuation time between healthy and vulnerable individuals. It also suggests approaches to manage surge prevention in large gatherings.
https://www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/events/6th-workshop-design-automation-cps-and-iot-destion-2024