July 2025 – Miranda & Rita’s abstract ‘Examining Vocal and Gestural Communication in Non-Speaking Individuals with Autism and Complex Neurodevelopmental Differences’ and Brynn’s abstract ‘Children’s Speech-based Auditory Statistical Learning Predicts Reading Skills and Intervention Outcomes’ were accepted for poster presentations at ASHA 2025

March 2025 – Siddhant and Kristy’s paper “Multi-Feature Audio Fusion for Nonverbal Vocalization Classification” for ICASSP 2025 was published!

February 2025 – Emma secured a $500 travel grant for INSAR 2025 in Seattle, Washington.

February 2025 – Siddhant secured a $2000 travel grant for INSAR 2025 in Seattle, Washington.

February 2025 – Miranda secured a $500 travel grant for INSAR 2025 in Seattle, Washington.

January 2025 – Siddhant secured a $1000 travel grant for ICASSP 2025 in Hyderabad, India.

January 2025 – Miranda’s abstract “Examining Adaptive Behavior and Communication in Non/Minimally-Speaking Individuals with Profound Autism” was accepted for an oral presentation at INSAR 2025!

January 2025 – Emma’s abstract “Exploratory Comparison of Caregiver Report and Clinical Communication Coding for Non-Speaking Individuals with Profound Autism” was accepted for a poster presentation at INSAR 2025!

January 2025 – Siddhant’s abstract “AI-Based Analysis and Classification of Communicative Nonverbal Vocalizations of Non- and Minimally-Speaking Individuals” was accepted for a poster presentation at INSAR 2025!

January 2025 – Siddhant’s paper “GameTox: A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis for Enhanced Toxicity Detection in Online Gaming Communities” was accepted to the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) conference.

December 2024 – Siddhant and Prof. Kristy’s paper “Multi-Feature Audio Fusion for Nonverbal Vocalization Classification” was accepted at ICASSP.

December 2024 – Kristy was named a Rising Star from San Deigo State University (SDSU) through their invited Rising Star Lecture Series

November 2024 – Siddhant presented his abstract “Exploratory acoustic analysis of nonverbal affective and communicative vocalizations from non-speaking individuals with autism using cosine similarity“ at the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Annual Meeting.

November 2024 – Siddhant presented his paper “MemeCLIP: Leveraging CLIP Representations for Multimodal Meme Classification“ at EMNLP.

November 2024 – Emma was named to the Northeastern Huntington 100 list

September 2024 – Siddhant Presented his abstract “Acoustic analysis of nonverbal vocalizations from non-speaking individuals with complex neurodevelopmental disorders” at the TNC Symposium.

Sep 2024 – Abhishek presented an abstract titled “Computer Vision Analysis of Body Movements and Facial Expressions of Individuals with Profound Neurodevelopmental Disorders” at the TNC Symposium.

September 2024 – NDD Lab welcomed Rita Khoury and Siddhant Bikram Shah!

August 2024 – Kristy was awarded the Innovation Award from the Phelan-McDermid Syndrome Foundation (PMSF) for the project, “ROSCO: A Novel Virtual Natural Communication Paradigm for Individuals with Phelan-McDermid Syndrome”

July 2024 – Kristy was awarded a 5-year NIH NIDCD Career Development Award (K25) for the project, “Using Mobile Technology and Real-World Vocalization Samples to Generate Quantitative Metrics of Vocal Communication for Minimally-Speaking Individuals”!

April 2024 – Emma and Prof. Kristy had their paper “Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Technology for Natural Language Samples of Toddlers With and Without Developmental Delays” and a poster accepted to the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMBC) Conference.

March 2024 – Emma presented her research abstract “Exploring the Clinical Utility of AI for the Transcription of Child Speech” at the Northeastern RISE Symposium!

March 2024 – Emma and Kristy presented their abstract and poster on “Developing a new virtual natural communication sampling paradigm for non- and minimally-speaking profoundly autistic individuals” at Duke University for the 2024 Meeting on Languge in Autism. The authors were Kristina T. Johnson, Emma McGonigle, Emine Arcasoy, Isabelle Iannotti, and Carol Wilkinson.

August 2023 – Kristy was awarded an NIH grant through the Tackling Language Acquisition in Kids (TALK) Supplement Initiative for a project entitled, “Development of a Novel Rapid Online Communication Assessment Tool for Toddlers with Developmental Synaptopathies”. This project is part of a part larger study through the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network Developmental Synaptopathies Consortium (RDCRN DSC), led by PI Dr. Mustafa Sahin