Divya Swaminathan
Bengaluru, Karnataka| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowships |
| Project Title: | Validating Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Algorithms in Indian Languages to Study Caregiver Speech (CGS) Input to Infants at High Likelihood for Autism Spectrum Disorder (HL ASD) |
| Field of Study: | Neurosciences |
| Home Institution: | National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, Karnataka |
| Host Institution: | University of Chicago , Chicago, IL |
| Grant Start Month: | September 2023 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Ms. Divya Swaminathan is a Ph.D. scholar at the Infant – Toddler Language Development and Intervention Lab, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. Before joining NIMHANS for her Ph.D., Ms. Swaminathan worked at the St. John’s National Academy of Health Sciences, Bengaluru, where she worked on developing an early screening tool for identifying increased likelihood for autism (HL-ASD) in infants between 9-18 months. She is a passionate clinician – researcher with expertise in detection of and intervention for autism.
Ms. Swaminathan’s current area of research focuses on early caregiver speech (CGS) and its impact on the development of communication and language skills in infants at HL-ASD. She is using automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to evaluate early CGS.
As a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellow, Ms. Swaminathan has joined Dr. Marisa Casillas’s lab. Ms. Swaminathan is working on improving existing ASR models that are sensitive to a multilingual setup. More accurate ASR models will help automatize amount of CGS that otherwise require laborious hand annotation