Academic interests and background
Here, I work as a Marie Curie Researcher on the Hindi-BabNet project with Prof. Natalia Kartushina. Our project aims to fill the gap in research on Hindi-speaking infants and toddlers by achieving the following goals:
- Recruiting parents of infants aged 8-36 months to collect CDI data and using parental reports with questionnaires to assess infants' vocabulary size and provide CDI norms for Hindi-speaking children.
- Recruiting participants from Hindi-speaking families with infants aged 3-12 months and collecting Infant and adult directed speech data from various socio-economic backgrounds.
- Analyzing how parents speak to their children in Hindi to understand the unique features of infant-directed speech (IDS) compared to adult-directed speech (ADS).
- Using machine learning to identify which features of IDS promote early language development among Hindi-speaking infants, providing new insights into parent-infant interactions in Indian families.
I also worked as a postdoctoral researcher from March 2022 to May 2024 on BabyLearn project. This project examined the acoustic properties of Norwegian Infant Directed Speech (IDS) and its role in speech sound discrimination, word comprehension, and word production in 6 to 18-month-old Norwegian-learning infants. In addition, infants' language skills will be tested, in an eye-tracking paradigm, at the ages of 6, 9, 12, and 18 months.
Before that, I worked as a Senior Project Scientist in the Acoustic Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur (INDIA). In addition, I have finished my PhD from the Acoustic lab at IIT Kanpur, India, where research work was based on speech acoustics and multi-microphone signal processing. My PhD thesis topic was "Source localization strategies for audible frequencies". I have completed my university and master's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering
I have understanding of frequentist and Bayesian statistics for data analysis. Further, I also have experience working on tools like Praat and Audacity.
I have hands-on experience with machine learning and large language models (Transformer, Fully connected, CNN, LSTM, and GRU). I am also familiar with linear algebra, optimization, and estimation techniques. I have also worked on deep learning toolkits like TensorFlow and Pytorch.
In summary I am not a linguist but a speech engineer and my academic intrests are:
- Speech Acoustics
- Early Language Developent
- Automatic speech recognition
- Audio/Speech Signal Processing
- Frequentist and Bayesian statistics
- Machine/Deep Learning
- Large Language Models
- Python, R
- Pytorch, TensorFlow
-
Bilingualism/multilingualism
Work Experience
2024- till date- Marie Curie Researcher on the Hindi-BabNet project
2022- 2024 – Postdoc – MultiLing – University of Oslo, Norway.
2020-2022 – Senior Research Scientist - Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India
Educational Background
Postgraduate
2020 PhD, Acoustics Lab, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, India
2010 Master of Technology, Electronics and communication Engineering, HBTU, Kanpur, India
Undergraduate
2007 Bachelor of Technology, Electronics and communication Engineering, UPTU, Lucknow, India
Awards
- 2007 MHRD INDIA Post Graduate Scholarship
- 2013 MHRD INDIA PhD Scholarship