Source: SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering
Written by: SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Dr. Ming Li, Assistant Professor of SYSU-CMU Joint Institute of Engineering (JIE), has received the 2016 IBM Faculty Award to recognize his work in speech processing and multimodal human behavior analysis for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This award is a competitive worldwide program to foster collaboration between IBM and researchers at leading universities.

Dr. Li worked with a leading doctor to establish a lab at the 3rd Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, which is funded by JIE and JRI new faculty startup fund, aiming to collect a large-scale multimodal dataset using multiple audio, visual and wearable sensors. The research seeks to analyze multimodal data with signal processing and machine learning technologies to discover an efficient way to diagnose ASD in children. One of his papers, co-authored with his Ph.D. student Wenbo Liu and psychology professor Li Yi at Peking University, presents a machine learning framework for ASD diagnosis based on eye-tracking devices [1]. The paper was recently accepted by Autism Research, a top journal in the field of autism study.

Dr. Li also collaborates with Prof. Bhiksha Raj of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science/Electrical & Computer Engineering on similar projects funded by the CMU-SYSU Collaborative Innovation Research Center.

[1] Wenbo Liu, Ming Li (*) and Li Yi, “Identifying Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Based on Their Face Processing Abnormality: A Machine Learning Framework,” Autism Research, 2016