Tahiya Chowdhury

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and AIDavis Institute for AI, Colby College

Davis 112, Colby College, Waterville, ME 04901
tahiya[dot]chowdhury[at]colby[dot]edu

[Scholar] [GitHub] [LinkedIn] [Blog]

You can find my CV here.

Spring 2026 Office Hours:

Mon, Wed 1:30-3:00pm, Fri 3:00-4:00pm

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and AI at Colby College. I am also a member of Davis institute for Artificial Intelligence, where I completed my Postdoctoral training with Prof. Amanda Stent as a Research Fellow. I received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, where I worked with Prof. Jorge Ortiz as a member of Cyber Physical Intelligence Lab (CyPhILab) and WINLAB.

I direct HUman, MAchiNe, and Environment Lab (HUMANE) lab, where I am fortunate to work with a group of amazing student collaborators on problems that are inspired by this broad question: How can human, machine, and the natural environment co-exist?

My current work sits at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction with a focus on human-centered tools and technology development. I use computational tools and models to understand conversations in our everyday social and professional settings. I also collaborate closely with community leaders, educators, and other stakeholders to develop computational solutions to support environmental sustainability and citizen science projects. My interest in human interaction and public-interest technology enables me to design innovative pedagogy and experiences to make AI education available to people with different backgrounds.

My research goal is to design, develop and evaluate intelligent tools to facilitate fair, reliable, and transparent interaction between humans and machines.

Research Interests: Multimodal Interaction, AI Education, AI for Environment

News

Jan '26 - Model AI Assignment on Bias in Large Image Dataset has been accepted to Educational Advances in AI (EAAI-26).

Jan '26 - Received a USGS Grant from Center for Maine Water Resources Research Institute for studying lake water quality in Maine.

Nov '25 - Our work data driven forecatsing of lake water quality got accepted to IEEE SusTech 2026. Congrats, Rishit! Read the preprint here.

Aug '25 - Two papers accepted to ICMI '25! Congrats, Cathy! Read more about the works here.

Aug '25 - Presented our Interspeech '25 paper at Rotterdam, the Netherlands this week! Read the paper here!

Aug '25 - Received a grant from Center for Arts and Humanities to teach an 'Island'-themed unit in my computer vision course.

July '25 - Reliability of pose estimation models under occlusion is accepted to ICMI '25 Late Breaking track. Congrats, Cathy!

May '25 - Our paper on reliability of automated speech features for autism diagnosis is accepted to Interspeech '25!

Mar '25 - Presented our work on forecasting water quality in Maine lakes at Maine Sustainability and Water Conference '25.

Mar '25 - Presented 'Computational Thinking with Computer Vision' at Educational Advances in AI at AAAI '25.

Jan '25 - Saki Imai presented our COLING '25 paper in Abu Dhabi, UAE!

Jan '25 - Paper on semantic segmentation for satellite imagery is accepted to Applied Computing and Geosciences!

Dec '24 - Paper on developing AI competency in introductory CS courses is accepted to AAAI (EAAI) '25!

Nov '24 - Our paper on evaluation of ASR system's performances under diverse conditions has been accepted to COLING '25! Congrats, Saki!

Aug '24 - Our paper on quantifying multimodal coordination behaviors is accepted to ICMI Late Breaking Results!

Aug '24 - Received a grant from Colby Center for Arts and Humanities to develope 'PLAY'-themed course units!

July '24 - Our paper on sustainable marine debris cleanup without human labels is presented at ACM Compass '24 in Delhi, India.

April '24 - Our work on Allen Island's ecosystem conservation with remote sensing and AI got featured on Colby Echo!

April '24 - Our paper on sustainable marine debris cleanup with human-AI collaboration got accepted to ACM Compass '24. Congrats, Ray!

Dec '23 - I will be joining Colby College as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of CS and AI in Fall '24!

Nov '23 - We presented our MultiSOCIAL toolbox at Society for Computation in Psych (SCiP).

Sep '23 - Our ICARD workshop for Autism Research was a success. Read the accepted papers.

July '23 - Paper on non-verbal coordination in autism diagnosis got accepted to SIGDIAL '23 workshop ICARD.

May '23 - Paper on Autism diagnosis with conversations got accepted to Interspeech '23.

April '23 - Workshop on multimodal AI tools for autism research got accepted to SigDial '23.

April '23 - Paper and workshop on interaction and multimodality got accepted to CogSci '23.

March '23 - Paper on child-centered AI design got accepted to CHI '23 workshop CCAI.

Sep '22 - I have joined Davis Institute for AI at Colby College as Research Fellow.

July '22 - I have defended my PhD thesis!