Alum spotlight: Aishat Aloba

The details: Aishat grew up in Nigeria and earned her undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Mississippi. Despite being nearly 6,000 miles from home, Aishat excelled, earning multiple awards and honors as well as maintaining a 4.0 GPA. Aishat entered the UF CISE computer science Ph.D. program in 2015. After joining my lab, and witnessing the successful founding of our Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Ph.D. degree, Aishat switched programs to HCC and graduated in 2021.

Dissertation project/topic: Aishat began her work in the INIT lab assisting on the POSE project. We were collaborating with the Jain lab on understanding and characterizing differences in child and adult whole-body motion. After moving into a leadership role on the project, Aishat built from this foundation into her dissertation topic, digging more deeply into how such differences affect automatic recognition of children’s motions.

Committee members (besides me): Dr. Jaime Ruiz, Dr. Eakta Jain, and Dr. Angelos Barmpoutis.

Where are they now: Aishat is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Meta, having done an internship with them the summer prior to her defense. As part of the Product Equity team, Aishat works on improving technology access and equity, emphasizing digital expansion, empowering women, and financial inclusion. Check out the team’s recent post from the Digital Technologies and Sustainable Development Workshop in Oxford in 2024.

Top publications: Aishat’s top-cited first-author paper from her time working with me is a paper on our Kinder-Gator dataset of child and adult motion at the Eurographics conference in 2018. Her other main first-author paper appeared at the Human-Computer Interaction International conference (HCII) in 2019 and is also well-cited.

Proud advisor moment: Watching Aishat receive the UF International Center Certificate of Excellence at the UF International Student Achievement Award Ceremony in 2018. 🥰 (Bonus: eating authentic Nigerian food with Aishat’s extended “family” in the US after her defense!)

Aishat’s thoughtful and holistic talent, drive, and influence will surely continue to be an asset to Meta. We can’t wait to see what’s next! ❤️