Duc Le Selected for Mary A. Rackham Institute Graduate Student Research Assistantship

CSE PhD student Duc Le has been selected by the Mary A. Rackham Institute (MARI) for a one-semester Graduate Student Research Assistantship. The Institute’s GSRA positions are offered to encourage outstanding doctoral students to pursue research careers in areas pertinent to the Institute’s mission of promoting the well-being of individuals who are struggling with mental health, learning, and communication difficulties.

Duc works with Prof. Emily Mower Provost in the area of computational modeling of human perception from speech.

Duc is interested in using the computer’s modeling power to better understand the inner workings of the human mind, and using this understanding to create more intelligent software programs. He is most interested in the aspect of human speech, which not only encodes semantic content but also influences the perception of other people about the speaker, such as his/her emotion, competence, personality, and other traits, and is interested in developing computational methods to model this kind of subjective perception. His current research pursuits make use of machine learning in speech/language processing, computational paralinguistics, emotion recognition, speech-based assistive technology, and clinical applications.

Outside of his studies, Duc is a member of the Michigan Table Tennis club. He also plays soccer, classical guitar, and enjoys skydiving.

Duc received his BS in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the University of Texas at Dallas in May 2012, and his MS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in May 2014. He interned at Amazon in Seattle, WA as a software engineer in the summers of 2011 and 2012 and is working at Facebook this summer as an intern for the Language Technology team.