Skills

Programming - C#, Python, MATLAB

Tools and Technologies - Unity3D, OpenGL, MATLAB, ASP.NET, Django, Docker

UI/UX Tools - Balsamiq, InVision

UI/UX Techniques - Interviews, Focus Groups, Affinity Diagramming, Storyboarding, Wireframing.

Honors and Awards

AI for Science Bootcamp Competition at University of Florida 2021

Standing InnOvation from University of Florida Innovate and Tech Licensing 2021

Intelligent virtual agents conference 2019 - Best Paper Award

Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship 2019

International Student Achievement Award 2019

VR based CPR hackathon project won as Best First-Time Hack (2017)

Autonomous cotton picking robot awarded as Top 10 Innovations in India by ASME ISHOW 2016

About

I am Mohan Zalake. I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Biomedical and Health Information Sciences department at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). I direct the V-ARE Lab (Virtual healthcARe Experiences Laboratory) at UIC. I have a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Florida. My research interest revolves around developing interactive Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). ECAs are computer generated human like 3-D characters and converse through natural language-style dialogues with humans. I am particularly interested in developing ECA's that can adapt behavior (both verbal and non-verbal) based on people's characteristics (e.g., personalities) to effectively persuade users in a social conversation.

My research has largely evaluated ECAs with social skills to improve population health. Although large population is aware of conversational interfaces like smart home speakers, very few are familiar with ECAs. My research focuses on identifying and understanding user needs of diverse healthcare population to build adaptive, intuitive, and usable ECA interfaces to positively influence people's health-related behavior. My research has also led to development of ECA-based interfaces that has been used by more than 4000+ users across different health contexts such as improving mental health among college students, supporting suicidal patients, increasing awareness of colon cancer screening among elderly population, and many more. Developing such interfaces involves interdisciplinary collaboration (like doctors, computer scientists, communication scientists), interacting with target population, understanding user needs, building prototypes and testing with target population through out the design process.

I have developed a platform called Virtual Interviewer Platform (VIP) that enables rapid development of web-based ECAs. I have also developed several Unity-based virtual reality experiences which demonstrate applicability of virtual reality in various domains. My interests include virtual agents, virtual reality, machine learning, computer graphics and human-computer interaction.