Mail : 3740 McClintock Ave. EEB 400
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2560

Office : RTH 318
Phone: (213) 821-4282

e-mail : metallin at usc dot edu

I am a PhD candidate in the Electrical Engineering (EE) department of the University of Southern California (USC). My advisor is prof. Shrikanth Narayanan. I am a member of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) since September 2007. I am graduating in Spring 2013.

My research interests include multimodal and speech signal processing, machine learning, statistical modeling and affective computing. My thesis topic focuses on developing accurate computational models for emotion recognition and understanding. Such models take into account the context in which an emotion is expressed, and capture the evolution of an emotional expression throughout interactions, highlighting regions of interest. Multimodality is a fundamental aspect of emotional expression and my work studies a variety of emotion-modulated modalities such as facial expressions, vocal characteristics, as well as body language movements and gestures conveying interaction information between participants of an affective conversation. Finally my thesis explores applications of such computational approaches in healthcare, specifically for analysis of affective facial expressions of children with autism spectrum disorders

This type of research has given me the unique opportunity to get involved with exciting multi-disciplinary collaborations with experts from domains quite different from engineering, such as theater and psychology.

In parallel, I have also worked in the speech and dialog systems area, as part of my microsoft research internship, where we explored the use of machine learning approaches for discriminative belief tracking for spoken dialog systems.

This website provides information about my research progress and publications. Please don't hesitate to contact me for comments or questions.