Mohammed Ehsan Hoque-Affective Computing Group-MIT Media Lab

Mohammed Ehsan Hoque

PhD Student, MIT Media Laboratory

E15-446, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1308

Office Phone: (617) 324-2136

Email: mehoque AT {mit dot edu} or {gmail dot com}

What's new?

Experience

Publications

Research

Diversity

What's new?

I look forward to attending Interspeech09 and IVA09 to present my papers.
I am currently working as a summer associate at Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development bringing robots to life.
I was the recipient of IEEE Gold Humanitarian Fellowship designed for engineering students in recognition of their skills and knowledge to aid humanitarian work (10 fellowships are granted per year around the world).
I was the finalist of the ASSETS08 Student Research Competition (SRC), and will compete at the SRC grand finals. [more updates]

Experience

Academia:

My research interests broadly revolve around speech processing, machine learning, emotion sensing, and computer vision.

I work as a Research Assistant at the Affective Computing Group of MIT Media Lab headed by Rosalind Picard. Our efforts, in part, involve iterative development and evaluation of ultra-mobile social-emotional technology to be used by individuals with high-functioning Autism and/or Asperger syndrome to improve their abilities in facial expression processing. This work is a collaborative effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory and the Groden Center. This project is funded by NSF.

I am also involved in "Computerized Interventions to Promote Verbal Expression in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder" funded by Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation (NLMFF). The goal of this project is to introduce novel technology that automatically identifies the areas of speech production difficulties and provides interactive interface for individuals to make an attempt to rectify it. This study is motivated by our hypothesis that real time visualizations of speech properties, which often act as social mirrors, can influence social communication.

My masters thesis involved automatic recognition of intentions, i.e., dialogue acts, from conversational speech. For example, "Can you please pass me the salt?" does not really inquire whether the person is capable of passing the salt or not, but, instead, conveys an implicit request. In my thesis, I have developed and compared models to recognize 13 types of dialogue acts using prosody, discourse and with their fusion. Please read my thesis for further details.

During my undergrad at Penn State University, I was involved in building a Human Interactive Robot able to locate and recognize faces with some help from voice identification, as part of my senior design project. The system performed surprisingly well with an accuracy rate of 85% on a half-dozen pre-trained people and competed strongly against systems from other schools, including Carnegie Mellon among others at the 4^th Annual Student Design Contest organized by Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. Our project also won the "Best Design Award" at Penn State judged by the local industries. Details can be found here.

Industry:

I have worked for Goldman, Sachs & Co. as a Technology Analyst with the Global Control Technology Group under the Firmwide Technology division.

I was responsible for building a web-enabled account maintenance tool and was involved in all cycles of development of this tool. This tool freed up .25 head count per year in our group and currently being leveraged in the New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Bangalore offices.