Designing, building, and evaluating technologies for underserved communities.
I am a Ph.D. student in the School of Computing and Information Science at Cornell Tech where I am co-advised by Dr. Nicola Dell and Dr. Aditya Vashistha, with additional mentorship from Dr. Deborah Estrin.
My research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), information and communication technologies for development (ICTD), and responsible artificial intelligence (R/AI). I work on designing, building, and evaluating sociotechnical systems that enable positive social transformation for underserved communities. My research focuses on intractable yet critical problems related to computing in high-stakes healthcare settings — particularly with respect to social determinants of health for community and home health workers.
Prior to attending Cornell, I received an M.S. in Computer Science from New York University where I was a graduate research fellow (and currently visiting scholar) at the Center for Responsible AI under the supervision of Dr. Julia Stoyanovich. Before academia, I worked as a software engineer for various New York City technology startups. Some of my most recent work includes creating open-source software to make robots for biologists and writing software to help build educators into entrepreneurs. Outside of academic activities, I am an avid Muay Thai practitioner, I enjoy reading, and love to cook — plus I have been known to eat.
Empowering Home Care Workers in New York City
I am currently working as part of a multidisciplinary research team, which includes researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell Computing and Information Science, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, the nation's largest healthcare union. Our research is focused on empowering home care workers (HCWs), who are primarily Black and Latina women who care for older adults and enable them to age in place.
Despite the growing importance of HCWs, research has shown that they are paid low wages, undervalued by other healthcare providers, insufficiently trained, operate in isolation, and struggle with their own health. In response, our research is focused on creating a data cooperative that centers HCWs who are at the crux of the caregiving crisis. Our goal is to shift the focus of data collection and governance away from monitoring workers, to providing HCWs with the agency to control what data is collected and how it will be used to advocate for their needs and the needs of their clients.
Ian René Solano-Kamaiko, Dibyendu Mishra, Nicola Dell, Aditya Vashistha. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24).
Mona Sloane, Ian René Solano-Kamaiko, Jun Yuan, Aritra Dasgupta, Julia Stoyanovich. Nature Machine Intelligence (March 2023).