JINGYAO WU
MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoc Associate, MIT Media Lab
Ph. D at University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
jingyaow@mit.edu
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MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Postdoctoral Fellow
Postdoc Associate, MIT Media Lab
Ph. D at University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
jingyaow@mit.edu
Google Scholar Linkedin ResearchGate
Welcome to my page! My name is Jingyao, I am a Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Jan 2025- current) and a recipient of the MIT–Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship (2025-2027). I received the B.E. (Hons) in Telecommunications Engineering and Ph.D. in Speech Signal Processing from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, in 2020 and 2024, respectively. My research frontiers Signal Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with particularly focus on Speech and Multisensory Intelligence for human-centered engineering. I am the lead author of the Best Paper Award at ACII 2023, and my work was recognized as a Top 3% Paper at IEEE ICASSP 2023. I am awarded The Rising Stars - Women in Engineering (2023). I serve as the Publications Chair for INTERSPEECH 2026. I am seeking a faculty position. Always happy to connect!
Research Interests
My research advancing signal processing, machine learning and AI:
Ambiguity-aware Speech Intelligence and Affective Computing: Investigating how ambiguity and uncertainty affect AI-driven decision-making in mental health, speech technology, and affective computing to improve interpretability and trustworthiness.
Temporal-aware Modelling for Emotion and Mental Health: Developing machine learning models to track temporal changes in emotional states and mental health conditions, enabling personalized monitoring and early forecasting of emotion fluctuations, depression severity, and well-being trajectories.
Speech and Multisensory Intelligence for Human Behaviour Modelling: Leveraging speech and multimodal data and innovative aggregation techniques to enhance AI-based detection, intervention, and understanding of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
2026/01: Our paper entitled "Human behavior atlas: Benchmarking unified psychological and social behavior understanding" has been accepted by ICLR 2026!
2026/01: Our paper entitled "AMBER2: DUAL AMBIGUITY-AWARE EMOTION RECOGNITION APPLIED TO SPEECH AND TEXT" has been accepted by ICASSP 2026!
2025/10: Guest lecture at MIT MAS.S63 Affective Computing and Multimodal Interaction at MIT Media Lab.
2025/10: Invited talk "Modeling Human Mental Behaviors: Ambiguity, Subjectivity, and Temporal Dynamics" at University of Melbourne, and University of New South Wales.
2025/09: Two papers accepted by Neurips 2025 workshop!
2025/09: Our Best ACII 2023 invitation journal paper, entitled "How many raters do we need? Analyses of uncertainty in estimating ambiguity-aware emotion labels" is accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing!
2025/08: Invited talk "Responsible Affective AI: Embracing Ambiguity and Subjectivity in Human-Centered Tasks" at Novo Nordisk A/S Denmark.
2025/06: Our paper entitled "Emotions as Ambiguity-aware Ordinal Representations" is accepted by ACII 2025.
2025/05: Our paper entitled "A Study of Speech Embedding Similarities Between Australian Aboriginal and High-Resource Languages" is accepted by INTERSPEECH 2025.
2025/05: I am invited to present at 2025 IEEE International Conference on AI and Data Analytics.
2025/04: I will serve as a Program Committe at ACII 2025 Multilingual and Multimodal Affective Computing (MMAC) workshop.
2024/12: I have been awarded the Ph.D! 🎓
2024/07: I have been offerred the MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024-2026 cohort)!
2024/07: Our paper entitled "Emotion Recognition Systems Must Embrace Ambiguity" is accepted by the Embracing Ambiguity and Subjectivity in Emotion Research (EASE 2024) workshop at ACII 2024.
2024/06: Our paper entitled "Dual-Constrained Dynamical Neural ODEs for Ambiguity-aware Continuous Emotion Prediction" is accepted by INTERSPEECH 2024.
2024/06: Our paper entitled "Can Modelling Inter-Rater Ambiguity Lead To Noise-Robust Continuous Emotion Predictions?" is accepted by INTERSPEECH 2024.
MIT – Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellowship (10 fellows per cohort), 2024 – 2026
Schmidt Science Fellows Program Nomination by UNSW (one out of two nominees), 2024
🏆 ACII 2023, Best Paper Award (Top 1)
🏆 ICASSP2023, Top 3% paper recognition
ISCA, AAAC travel grant
The Rising Stars Women in Engineering (24 awardees, awarded at the Asian Dean’s Forum), 2023
University of International Postgraduate Award (UIPA) scholarship at UNSW, Australia, 2020 – 2024
Runner-up of the Three-Minute-Thesis (3MT) competition of the Faculty of Engineering, UNSW, 2023
Winner of 3MT of the School of EET, UNSW, 2023
4th rank in Honours Thesis Competition, UNSW, 2019
2nd rank in IEEE Signal Processing Cup at ICASSP2019
Taste of Research scholarship, UNSW, 2018
Reviewer:
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing
INTERSPEECH
ACII
ACIS2024
ICASSP
Program Committe:
Organization committee of Harvard-MIT Speech and Language Biomarker Network.
Organization committee of ICASSP 2026 Automatic Song Aesthetics Evaluation Challenge
ACII 2025 Multilingual and Multimodal Affective Computing (MMAC) workshop.
Senior Panel at INTERSPEECH Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop (YFRSW) 2025