About me
Hello! I am Payal (hear pronunciation📢). I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, part of the IDEAS Lab and advised by Dr. Qi Zhu.
My research is focused on human-centric applications that bridge computer science and health. Specifically, I develop machine learning techniques for real-world challenges involving audio, healthcare, and time-series sensor data. These applications are pervasive but often come with challenges in data analysis and model development. I aim to design robust algorithms that handle issues like data quality, sparsity, and resource constraints. A significant part of my work explores the trade-offs between personalization and generalization in algorithm design, with an emphasis on making technology more inclusive for underrepresented users (e.g., atypical speakers in voice technology, and skin-tone diversity in optical heart rate monitoring). In addition to model performance, I prioritize explainability and resource efficiency.
Before my PhD, I worked as an IC design engineer at Analog Devices Inc., developing formal verification methods for application-specific ICs. I hold a Masters by Research in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where I designed a sensing and algorithms framework for cardiac wearables.
📧 You can reach me at payalmohapatra2026 at u dot northwestern dot edu. And here is a link to my CV (last updated February 2025).
If you prefer an audio-visual version of my research,
Ongoing Projects
Learning from Irregular and Heterogenous Modalities
Investigating methods to model the underlying process dynamics for irregular time-series, ranging from uniformly sampled to sparse or missing variates, to learn task-agnostic representations while modeling the inter-modality interactions.
Practitioner's Guide to Manufacturing Workplace Safety
Collaborating with Boeing and MxD to create a browsable repository of COTS sensors and wearable-data analytics to enhance workplace safety by quantifying risk factors. Assessing the validity of off-the-shelf pose analytics for extracting ergonomic risk metrics (RULA/REBA scores).
News
- June 2025 - I will be interning with Mitsubishi Electric Labs (MERL), Boston, MA this summer as a Research Scientist. Reach out if you are here and want to collaborate (or just catch up over coffee ☕).
- April 2025 — Selected as one of six speakers to present a Lightning Talk at CoDEX symposium, Northwestern University.
- February 2025 - Submitted our paper on surface-EMG based silent-speech recognition using LLMs to ACL.
- January 2025 - Submitted our paper on head-orientation based acoustic zones' localization to IMWUT.
- January 2025 - Submitted our paper on phase-driven domain generalization for time series to TMLR.
- December 2024🏃♀️ - Successfully passed my PhD Prospectus examination — 2/3 of the journey complete!
- October 2024📰 - Our paper Wearable Network for Multi-Level Physical Fatigue Prediction in Manufacturing Workers is accepted in PNAS Nexus journal. Featured by tech news outlets like MSN, TechXplore, PopSci, News-Medical, Yahoo Tech, Northwestern Engineering.
- August 2024🏆 - Excited to be selected as the EECS Rising Star 2024! Invited to the 2-day workshop hosted at MIT in October. Read more in this article by Northwestern.
- June 2024 - Started my summer internship with Meta Reality Labs as a Research Scientist.
- June 2024 - Our paper on Missingness-resilient Video-enhanced Multimodal Disfluency Detection is accepted and chosen for oral presentation at InterSpeech'24.
- February 2024 - My internship work with Meta Reality Labs on efficient event detection on smart glasses—Non-verbal Hands-free Control for Smart Glasses using Teeth Clicks—is now live!
- October 2023 - Corresponding with Meta Reality Labs, Audio Research group as a part-time student researcher.
- July 2023 - Our paper on the Effect of Attention and Self-Supervised Speech Embeddings on Non-Semantic Speech Tasks has been accepted for ACM Multimedia 2023 Multimedia Grand Challenges Track.
- June 2023 - I will be interning with Meta Reality Labs, Redmond, WA this summer as a Research Scientist. Reach out if you are here and want to collaborate (or just catch up over coffee ☕).
- May 2023 - We are participating in the ACM Multimedia 2023 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE).
- February 2023 - Our paper on Efficient Stuttering Event Detection using Siamese Networks is accepted in ICASSP'23.
- February 2023 - Secured third place in e-Prevention: Person Identification and Relapse Detection from Continuous Recordings of Biosignals Challenge in ICASSP'23. Invited to present a paper on methodology - Person Identification with Wearable Sensing using Missing Feature Encoding and Multi-Stage Modality Fusion.
- December 2022 - Demonstrated final working prototype of fatigue prediction in workers with near-real-time visualization at the Boeing, Everett, Washington, factory floor.
- August 2022 - Demonstrated initial working prototype of fatigue prediction in workers with near-real-time visualization at the John Deere, Knoxville, Tennessee, factory floor.
- July 2022 - Presented Speech Disfluency Detection with Contextual Representation and Data Distillation at Intelligent Acoustic Systems and Applications co-located with MobiSys'22.
- April 2022 - Presented poster on Speech Disfluency Detection under Data Constraints at CRA-WP grad cohort at New Orleans, Louisiana.
Services
- Reviewer: ICASSP’25, ICLR’25, NeurIPS’24 (TSALM workshop), IMWUT’24, IROS’24, ICASSP’24
- External Reviewer: ASP-DAC’24, EMSOFT’23, ICCPS’23, NSys’22
- Book Reviews: Cambridge University Press early reader’s reviewing
- Organize biweekly inter-laboratory Cyber-Physical Systems study group at Northwestern.
- Active participant in the ML reading group at Northwestern, covering topics like XGBoost, MultiModal Learning, and Non-Stationary Transformers.
- Mentoring:
- 2024: Xiaoyuan Zhang, Talia-Ben Naim (MS students, Computer Engineering, Northwestern), Brooks Hu (Undergraduate, Computer Engineering, Northwestern), Mark Zhang (MS students, Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern)
- 2023:
- Yueyuan Sui (MS, Northwestern University → PhD, Northwestern University), Shamika Likhite (MS, Northwestern University → SWE, SpeechAce)
- Kiva Joseph (Undergraduates, Computer Engineering, Northwestern)
- Jonathan Li Chen, Ben Forbes, Justin Lau (Undergraduates, Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern)
- 2022: Devashri Naik (MS, Northwestern University → PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago), Jinjin Cai (MS, Northwestern University → PhD, Purdue University) (MS students, Computer Engineering, Northwestern)