Andrew Balch

Andrew Balch

he/him/his

Computer Science student interested in tackling social problems

Papers

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Preprints

Why Algorithms Remain Unjust: Power Structures Surrounding Algorithmic Inequality

Published in arXiv, 2024

Inspired by the sociologist Erik Olin Wright, I conducted an analysis of the power structures that interact with and influence the ways algorithms impact society to perpetuate injustice. Under review at ACM CHI 2025 (alt.chi track).

Recommended citation: Balch, Andrew. (2024). "Why Algorithms Remain Unjust: Power Structures Surrounding Algorithmic Inequality." arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.18461.
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Exploring Smartphone-based Spectrophotometry for Nutrient Identification and Quantification

Published in arXiv, 2024

During my time as a UVA Dean’s Research Fellow, I utilized my physical prototyping skills to refine an existing design for a smartphone-based spectrophotometer. I built a custom image analysis pipeline to extract quantitative absorbance spectra data using just a smartphone camera and conducted several experiments to fine-tune the performance of the device on micronutrient samples. I demo’d our approach at MobiCom 2024 where I won 3rd place at the undergraduate research competition, and the project was featured in a news article by UVA Today! Under review at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

Recommended citation: Balch, Andrew, Cardei, Maria A., Doryab, Afsaneh. (2024). "Exploring Smartphone-based Spectrophotometry for Nutrient Identification and Quantification." arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11027.
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Towards an Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Status Assessment Method: A Comprehensive Review of Existing Techniques

Published in arXiv, 2024

A culmination of 2 years of interdisciplinary research at the UVA Human-AI Technology Lab that I have led since my first year. This survey paper examines how the global issue of micronutrient malnutrition has been addressed, exhaustively bridging the clinical and technological aspects of micronutrient status assessment to provide insights and recommendations for future work to effectively address this problem. Under review at ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.

Recommended citation: Balch, Andrew, Cardei, Maria A., Kranz, Sibylle, Doryab, Afsaneh. (2024). "Towards an Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Status Assessment Method: A Comprehensive Review of Existing Techniques." arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.11877.
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Coursework

HCI Project Report: Culture, Identity, and App Genres in Mobile Application Permission Decisions

Published:

The final deliverable for the semester-long group research project in my graduate-level Human-Computer Interaction class. Motivated by an understanding that privacy and security needs are informed by individual backgrounds, we sought to understand how these unique needs manifest in the context of mobile application permissions to hopefully guide inclusive app designs. We designed, analyzed, and presented the results of a study aimed at forming an understanding of how users’ gender, race and ethnicity, and nationality impact the permissions they allow to a mobile app, and to what degree they allowed these permissions. In addition, we explored how app genres interact with these demographic factors to affect permission-granting.

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Thesis Prospectus: Data-Driven Event Sequence Visualization for Rectal Cancer Outcomes; Taxonomizing the Role of Mobile Applications in Sociotechnical Feedback Loops

Published:

In Fall 2024, I completed my thesis prospectus for my B.S. in Computer Science. The prospectus outlines the technical and STS contributions of my thesis. I use Actor-Network Theory to connect these two aspects in the context of social justice, emphasizing how algorithmic systems shape and are shaped by society. Next Spring, I will be conducting an STS research project on algorithmic influence in mobile applications to round-out my thesis. More details about the technical component are described in my capstone research paper.

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Capstone Technical Report: Data-Driven Event Sequence Visualization of Rectal Cancer Outcomes

Published:

For my Bachelor’s of Science capstone project, I continued work I began in 2020 with Emory University modeling a unique dataset of rectal cancer treatment paths. I cleaned the hand-entered data and developed a novel, data-driven visualization approach that integrates feature selection techniques. Click the link to also see my poster, which was presented at the 2024 UVA Engineering Research Expo!

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Governor’s School Mentorship: Transformer-Based Architecture for Android Malware Classification and TTP Prediction

Published:

In my senior year of high school at the Governor’s School for Science and Technology (a public, dual-enrollment program), I conducted a deep learning research project for Android malware detection under the mentorship of Wes Jordan at MITRE. I used the TensorFlow and data science skills I picked up during COVID to develop a framework that generalized the problem to an NLP task via tokenization and applied a transformer architecture. Although the computational cost far exceed anything I had access to, I still learned a lot!

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Junior Research Project: Automated Induction Robotics

Published:

For my junior research project at the Governor’s School, I designed and built a platform for warehouse robotics (like those used by Amazon) that were powered through wireless induction. Everything I did in this project, from programming and cloud infrastructure to computer-aided design and manufacture, was entirely self-taught. It placed first at the Tidewater Science and Engineering Fair and was accepted to the International Science Fair, but this was canceled due to COVID. For more details, check out my post here!

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Conference Abstracts

Feasibility of Smartphones for Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Assessment

Published in ACM Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ’24), 2024

In November 2024, I had the opportunity to demo how a smartphone-based spectrophotometer can be used to quantify micronutrients (vitamin B12) to conference attendees at MobiCom 2024 in Washington D.C.! This was a great exercise of my public speaking and presentation skills, and I got to meet lots of other researchers and learn about their work. I also competed in the Student Research Competition, where I won 3rd place in the undergraduate category! For more details on the project, check out our full paper
.

Recommended citation: Andrew Balch and Afsaneh Doryab. 2024. Feasibility of Smartphones for Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Assessment. In The 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom ’24), November 18–22, 2024, Washington D.C., DC, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3636534.3698861
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Towards Smartphone-Based Monitoring of Micronutrient Status

Published in ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (BCB ’24), 2024

I was granted another opportunity to present my work on smartphone-based spectrophotometry for micronutrient assessment at ACM BCB 2024! Although I didn’t get to go (the dates overlapped with my MobiCom demo), it is still an honor to have my work represented. For more details on the project, check out our full paper here.

Recommended citation: Andrew Balch and Afsaneh Doryab. 2024. Towards Smartphone-Based Monitoring of Micronutrient Status. In 15th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (BCB ’24), November 22–25, 2024, Shenzhen, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3698587.3701418
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