Our Story
MAP Lab grew out of more than a decade of research in UVA's Link Lab developing mobile, wearable, sensing, and data-driven technologies to understand and support people in their everyday lives. Research projects required the team to build custom systems, including smartphone applications, wearable sensing platforms, digital interventions, secure cloud infrastructure, and tools for collecting and analyzing complex multimodal data. Over time, many of the same technical challenges reappeared across studies and disciplines, creating an opportunity to transform innovations developed for individual projects into reusable technologies and infrastructure that could enable research more broadly.
The Mobile, AI, and People (MAP) Lab builds on this foundation by bringing together research, research engineering, and shared infrastructure for the emerging era of AI and personal sensing. MAP Lab develops new capabilities through research and makes successful technologies available for reuse by other investigators, reducing the cost and effort required to launch new studies. Each new project can build on existing capabilities while contributing new features and technical advances that strengthen the shared infrastructure for future research. Collaborations with investigators also introduce new questions and technical challenges that drive the next generation of innovation. This creates a continuous cycle in which research drives technology development, technology enables new research, and successful innovations become shared capabilities for the broader UVA research community.
Our mission
Modern research increasingly depends on mobile technologies, wearable sensing, secure data infrastructure, and AI—but turning these technologies into rigorous, deployable research studies requires specialized expertise.
MAP Lab helps UVA researchers move from ideas to working research systems. We partner with investigators from early technical exploration and study design through development, deployment, and ongoing study operations, bringing together research engineering, design, and technical expertise to make ambitious technology-enabled research possible.
Our partners
We work with UVA programs that connect researchers with expertise, infrastructure, and support.
Our home at UVA
MAP Lab is based in the Link Lab at UVA Engineering. This interdisciplinary home connects us with researchers working across engineering, health, behavior, and the social sciences, while giving projects access to a broader community focused on technologies that interact with people and the world around them.
Supported by UVA
MAP Lab is supported by the University of Virginia's Strategic Investment Fund through the Digital Technology Administration and Core initiative, the earlier name for the work that became MAP Lab. This support helps us build shared expertise and infrastructure for ambitious research across the university.