Mixture of Emotion Dependent Experts: Facial Expressions Recognition in Videos Through Stacked Expert Models

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, where I am a member of the Multimodal Speech Processing (MSP) Lab led by Prof. Carlos Busso. My research sits at the intersection of multimodal speech processing and controllable generation: I model atypical speech and speech-grounded facial dynamics, and use generative models to make speech and facial technologies work for the people they most often fail, including children with speech disorders, individuals with craniofacial anomalies, and second-language learners.

My work spans generative reconstruction of disordered speech, synthetic data for low-resource clinical ASR, anatomically consistent facial analysis and synthesis, and interpretable multimodal biomarkers of speech disorders. In summer 2026 I interned with the Apple Accessibility team in Seattle, working on atypical speech generation.

My Ph.D. research is developed in collaboration with Children’s Health Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center, with Dr. Rami Hallac, Director of Research at the Analytical Imaging and Modeling (AIM) Center at Children’s Medical Center and Associate Professor at UT Southwestern. I communicate my work to both the AI and the medical communities: beyond AI venues such as ICMI and Interspeech, I have presented at clinical meetings, including the American Cleft Palate–Craniofacial Association annual meeting (ACPA 2024) and the International Congress on Cleft Lip/Palate (CLEFT 2025), and published in The Cleft Palate Craniofacial Journal.