Najim Dehak

Najim Dehak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, part of the Whiting School of Engineering. His research focuses on machine learning applied to speech processing, audio classification, and health applications. He is renowned for developing the I-vector representation for speaker recognition, introduced in 2008 during a workshop at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Language and Speech Processing. Prior to this role, he was a research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Dehak holds a PhD from the School of Advanced Technology in Montreal (2009). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and contributes to the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee. His work bridges AI, healthcare, and signal processing, with notable contributions to neurodegenerative disease detection via speech and handwriting analysis.

Research interests include adversarial attacks on speech systems, multimodal biomarker discovery, and robust speech processing across demographics. His lab’s tools, like the Hermespeech Recorder, enable scalable data collection for clinical and research applications.

• Education: PhD in Advanced Technology (2009), Montreal
• Affiliations: Johns Hopkins University, IEEE
• Labs/Teams: Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP)

His recent work explores AI’s role in aging research, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease detection through speech, eye tracking, and handwriting analysis. Ongoing projects address fairness in speaker verification and robustness against adversarial attacks in ASR systems.