Emily Mower Provost

Emily Mower Provost is a Professor and Senior Associate Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, with a courtesy appointment in Psychiatry. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (2010). Her work focuses on human-centered speech and video processing, particularly in emotion recognition, mental health modeling, and assistive technology. Notable contributions include advancing speech-based machine learning for mental health monitoring and developing datasets like UMEME and UMSSED.

Her research integrates speech and multimodal data to address challenges in mental health, such as bipolar disorder symptom tracking and suicide risk assessment. She has pioneered methods for emotion recognition in natural speech, emphasizing the mismatch between emotional expression and perception. Key awards include the NSF CAREER Award (2017) and Toyota Faculty Scholar Award (2020).

• Key Projects: PRIORI emotion dataset linking mood to emotion detection, assistive technology for Huntington's disease speech monitoring, and speech-based tools for Alzheimer's early detection.
• Grants: NSF grants for emotion classifier development and mental health tracking.

Labs/Teams: Core contributor to the Heinz C. Prechter Longitudinal Study of Bipolar Disorder, advancing digital phenotyping for mental health. Active in organizing workshops for female researchers in speech science and technology.