W&M Team Wins Best Paper Award at CHASE 2025

We are thrilled to announce that Professors Gang Zhou and Huajie Shao, along with a team of William & Mary graduate students, have received the Best Paper Award at the prestigious ACM/IEEE Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE 2025). Their paper, titled “Trigger-Finder: A Real-Time Freezing-of-Gait Trigger Detection System Using an Instruction-Tuned Multimodal Large Language Model,” introduces the first real-time system capable of detecting environmental triggers that lead to Freezing of Gait (FoG) in Parkinson’s disease patients—before the episodes occur.

The paper presents a novel approach using instruction-tuned multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to analyze real-world visual data and identify five clinically recognized FoG triggers: floor pattern changes, tight turns, dual-tasking, narrow passages, and distractions. Offloading inference to an edge server enables the system to deliver accurate, interpretable results in real time — achieving a detection latency of just 0.8 seconds and outperforming state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o.

The award-winning team includes William & Mary Ph.D. students Chen Qian, Chuntian Chi, and John Clapham, as well as undergraduate students Jiarui Qi and Zherui Zhang.

This recognition comes alongside another major achievement for Prof. Gang Zhou, who serves as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (ACM HEALTH). Under his leadership, the journal has received its first official impact factor of 8.0, establishing ACM HEALTH as a leading venue for research at the intersection of computing and healthcare.

Congratulations to the entire team on these remarkable accomplishments!