About Omar

email: omar a cs dot berkeley dot edu

I'm a third year Computer Science PhD student at Berkeley, in the Berkeley Institute of Design. My advisor is John Canny. My research explores how we can leverage sensed data in highly sensed environments to help persuade individuals to enact desired behaviors. Specifically, I'm trying to get people to enact more environmentally sustainable behaviors (like enacting the 3 Rs). You know, do my part to help curb that thing called Global Warming. Beyond individuals, I'm looking at how persuasive technologies might be used to convey information to building managers, policy makers, and others with power to make relevant changes. I've been working on a number of projects on this front, and am putting together a project page to showcase all of them. For now, check out some of my recent publications below.

I'm originally from Toronto, did my undergraduate work at Cornell in Ithaca, and ended up in the Bay Area to work at Google. After a few years, I came back into the academic fold, and here I am.

Publications

Promoting Environmentally Sustainable Behaviors Using Social Marketing In Emerging Persuasive Technologies, Omar Khan, John Canny. To appear at Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability Workshop at the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, May 19-22, 2008 in Sydney, Australia. (short version, long version)

Observation Networks: Leveraging the Persuasive Force of Human Observation, Omar Khan. To appear at CHI 2008 Workshop on Ambient Persuasion. (pdf)

publications from previous life

Chora: Expert-based Peer-to-peer web search, H. Gylfason, O. Khan, G. Schoenebeck. AP2PC workshop at AAMAS 2006.

Tracking Evolving Communities in Large Linked Networks, J. Hopcroft, O. Khan, B. Kulis, and B. Selman. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 101, pp. 5249-5253, April, 2004.

Natural Communities in Large Linked Networks, J. Hopcroft, O. Khan, B. Kulis, and B. Selman. Proc. 9th ACM SIGKDD Conference, 2003.

etc

I also try to keep things in perspective. So here I place some recent things that I've enjoyed. You can check out my blog for even more stuff.

Winter in Toronto

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