معرفی
Payal Mohapatra is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Computer Engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, part of the IDEAS Lab under the advisement of Dr. Qi Zhu. Her research focuses on human-centric applications of machine learning in healthcare, audio, and time-series data, emphasizing inclusivity and robust algorithm design. Prior to her PhD, she worked as an IC design engineer at Analog Devices Inc. and earned a Masters by Research from IIT Madras.
Her research spans challenges like data quality in wearable sensors and trade-offs between personalization and generalization in algorithms. Notable projects include fatigue prediction in manufacturing workers and multimodal disfluency detection. She has interned at Meta Reality Labs and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL).
Key Contributions:
- Developed a multimodal framework for disfluency detection, achieving 10% performance improvement over unimodal methods (Interspeech 2024).
- Pioneered teeth-click-based hands-free control for smart glasses, enabling non-verbal interactions (MERL 2024).
- Designed a wearable network for workplace safety, published in PNAS Nexus and featured in tech media (2024).
Awards & Recognition:
- EECS Rising Star 2024 (MIT Workshop Invitation)
- Best Paper Award at IEEE WINTECHCON 2018
- Anveshan Design Fellowship 2016 (Analog Devices)
Collaborations & Mentorship:
- Advised 12+ students across MS/undergraduate programs
- Organized inter-laboratory Cyber-Physical Systems study groups
- Collaborated with Boeing, Meta, MERL, and MxD on industry-focused research
