I am currently a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering
Department at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles,
pursuing a Ph.D
under the supervision of Shri
Narayanan, director of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation
Lab (SAIL). I obtained my Masters' degree in Electrical Engineering, also from USC, in mid-2004. The current focus of my research
is to develop ways to exploit high-level prosodic (suprasegmental) cues
and their relationship with the structure of language (syntax, for
instance) to improve spontaneous speech understanding applications. In
addition, I am / have been a teaching assistant for introductory and advanced courses in speech processing and recognition. Please see my resume, and visit the SAIL SponSpeech webpage for further details.
A brief autobiography: I was born in the year of the Monkey in Pondicherry,
India, though I hardly
ever lived there; I spent my kindergarten and primary school years (a
total of about eight) in Bombay, that huge,
crowded metropolis on the west coast of India. For most of my teenage / high school years (about seven), I was in Ahmedabad, which in
comparison with Bombay presents a
smaller, cleaner (?!) and more laid-back environment. After completing high school, I returned to
Bombay to pursue my undergraduate degree. I joined
USC to pursue a graduate degree in Fall
2002, almost immediately after I obtained my Bachelors' degree in
Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Bombay, India.
I am vegetarian by choice, a liberal leftist on the political compass,
with a strong conservationist streak. Walk, run, bike, or take the
metro. You will save more than just money. Away from work, I lead a
very active lifestyle, dominated by an extreme passion for middle- and
long-distance running (5K through marathon distance). I began running
in the spring of 2004 and have been improving steadily ever since.
Eventually, I hope to be competitive at the regional level. My
inspiration for running and for life is Hicham El-Guerrouj, arguably the greatest middle distance athlete of all time. Here is a video of his memorable triumph at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
On these pages, you will find information about my work, activities,
and
interests, among
other things. Use the links bar on the top of each page to browse
around and see if there's
something that interests
you. I encourage feedback in the form of comments, suggestions and
cribs regarding broken links and other issues [with the sole exception
of requests to change the layout and colour scheme!]. So why not take a
moment to sign my guestbook?
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USC, in mid-2004. The current focus of my research
is to develop ways to exploit high-level prosodic (suprasegmental) cues
and their relationship with the structure of language (syntax, for
instance) to improve spontaneous speech understanding applications. In
addition, I am / have been a teaching assistant for introductory and advanced courses in speech processing and recognition. Please see my resume, and visit the SAIL SponSpeech webpage for further details.