Larry Zhang

Larry Zhang

Dual PhD Student in Complex Network Systems and Intelligent Systems Engineering

Indiana University Bloomington

Biography

I am a Dual PhD Student in the Department of Informatics (specializing in Complex Network Systems), and the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering (specializing in Neuroengineering) at Indiana University Bloomington (IU) as a Fellow of the CNS-NRT Program funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). I am co-advised by Yong-Yeol Ahn and Gregory Lewis.

In 2023, I am working at the National Institute for Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan from January to May on psychophysiological applications in information interaction and search, Samsung Digital Health Lab in Mountain View, California from May to September on stress sensing, and Central European University in Vienna, Austria from September to December on higher-order interactions in temporal brain fingerprinting research.

My research focuses on applying computational and cognitive models to measurements from multimodal behavioral sensing technologies (e.g. voice recordings, heart rate, pose, language) to enable and accelerate theory building around neuropsychiatric health and general wellbeing. I am particularly interested in developing cheap, non-invasive measures of neuropsychiatric state to make psychiatric healthcare more accessible to all. Currently, I am studying computational methods for assessing cross-modal synchrony in behavioral and neuroscientific studies.

Prior to IU, I worked on research at the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where I worked with Mohammad Soleymani and Stefan Scherer studying multimodal behavioral sensing in substance abuse disorders and psychological distress. I also worked with Reza Hosseini Ghomi and Trevor Cohen at the University of Washington studying vocal biomarkers and the clinical application of semantic memory networks for cognitive decline. I continue to study semantic memory search with Michael Jones at IU.

Download Larry’s resumé.

Interests
  • Affective Computing
  • Behavioral Signal Processing
  • Behavioral and Physiological Synchrony
  • Digital Neuropsychiatry Applications
  • Cognitive Science
  • Accessible Mental Healthcare
  • Multimodal Machine Learning
Education
  • Dual PhD in Complex Network Systems and Intelligent Systems Engineering, 2020 - Present

    Indiana University Bloomington

  • BS in Electrical Engineering (Specialization in Machine Learning and Controls), 2013 - 2017

    University of California, San Diego

Skills

Multimodal Data

Acoustic, Linguistic, Physiology, Body & Head Pose

Data Visualization

Plotly, Altair, Seaborn, Vega

Data Management

MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS

Neuropsychiatric Research

Digital Biomarkers, Clinical Study Design, Ethics Approval

Scientific Writing

Journal articles, Grants & Fellowships, Reviewing

Scientific Visualization

Fury.gl, Blender, VTK, trimesh

Data Science

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Network Science, Dynamical Systems

Open Source Development

Scientific Computing and Package Development

Scientific Communication

Conference Presentations and Public Speaking

Python
Linux
Git

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
NSF Research Traineeship Fellow
Aug 2020 – Present Bloomington, IN, USA
  • Conducting Research with Faculty across Intelligent Systems Engineering, Cognitive Science, and Informatics.
  • Researching information theoretic and tensor factorization methods on time-varying synchronization phenomena including behavioral, physiological, and neural synchronization studies.
  • Proposed new predictive model of semantic memory search outperforming existing methodologies.
  • Developed multimodal cross-atlas reference brain organ for user studies in HuBMAP interface.
 
 
 
 
 
Project Assistant
Feb 2020 – Jul 2020 Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Investigated multimodal sensing on vocal behaviors for clinical interviewing applications.
  • Published paper on automatic coding in motivational interviewing via representation learning.
  • Led study linking multimodal vocal behaviors to psychological distress symptoms in virtual human interviews.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Manager
Apr 2019 – Jan 2020 Remote, CA, USA
  • Led research efforts and data science projects; manage and develop projects for 20 tribe members.
  • Developed computational analysis direction for clients including Harvard, Stanford, Biogen, LEO I-Lab.
  • Explored machine learning and signal processing methodology for internal product improvement.
  • Published research on vocal markers of cognitive decline in Framingham Heart Study Cognitive Aging Cohort
 
 
 
 
 
Research Assistant
Aug 2018 – Jun 2019 Stanford, CA, USA
  • Lead machine learning analysis across voice and survey data in adolescent depression study.
  • Piloted development of robust ML models on language and acoustic data.
  • Devised data analysis approach to identify key features with predictive power in remission detection.
  • Co-first author abstract accepted to Society for Biological Psychiatry Conference.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Assistant
Apr 2018 – Jun 2019 Seattle, WA, USA
  • Lead developer of lab’s data science team, supervised 12 undergraduate and graduate students.
  • Built acoustic models of depression with near-SOTA performance on non-curated clinical datasets.
  • Established extensive data-featurization pipeline to collect thousands of features to model voice data.
  • Published two manuscripts on voice biomarkers for depression on psychomotor disturbances.
 
 
 
 
 
Mixed Signal Engineer
Mar 2019 – Mar 2018 Santa Clara, CA, USA
  • Deployed automation framework to accelerate data collection and analysis from key GPU endpoints.
  • Established end-to-end analytics framework for circuit verification insights from millions of datapoints.
  • Achieved 94% accuracy classifying silicon health of data; predicted parameters within ±0.5 loss range.
 
 
 
 
 
Community Developer
Sep 2017 – Jan 2018 Santa Clara, CA, USA
  • Tuned parameters for a Neural Collaborative Filtering model on corpus of resumes and job postings.
  • Implemented Bi-recurrent LSTM on IMDB Sentiment Dataset in BigDL framework as proof of concept.
  • Implemented LSTM in a time series-based model on Pollution Dataset in BigDL as proof of concept.
 
 
 
 
 
Undergraduate Researcher
Sep 2016 – Jun 2017 San Diego, CA, USA
  • Investigated implementation of convolutional neural networks on the TrueNorth neuromorphic chip.
  • Implemented EEDN spiking network implementation of convolutional neural networks on TrueNorth.
  • Presented on backprop methodology utilizing binary weights in spiking network to discussion group.

Accomplish­ments

NSF-NRT Research Trainee Fellowship

Projects

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Recent & Upcoming Talks

To Be Anounced