Associate Professor Beena Ahmed

My Expertise

Applications of machine learning, pattern classification and deep neural nets for healthcare and therapeutic applications.

Fields of Research (FoR)

Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning, Signal Processing, Pattern Recognition and Data Mining

SEO tags

Behaviour and Health

Occupational, speech and physiotherapy

Cancer and Related Disorders

Cardiovascular System and Diseases

Biography

Dr. Beena Ahmed is an Associate Professor in Signal Processing with the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications. She received her B.Sc. Engineering in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan in 1993 and her Ph.D. from UNSW in 2004. She joined UNSW in 2017. Prior to that she was an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar.

Dr. Ahmed has been...view more

Dr. Ahmed has been awarded international research grants for projects on long-term insomnia monitoring and remote speech therapy. She also received funding to use wearable physiological sensors to identify physiological correlates of mental stress and then adopt these correlates to develop biofeedback mobile games to teach users relaxation skills. Her current research interests are on applying machine learning and remote monitoring in healthcare and therapeutic applications. Specifically she is looking into algorithms to

track cognitive ability in the elderly using paralinguistic features
recognize speech production errors in patients undergoing speech therapy and second language speakers
adapt automatic speech recognition for use by people with speech impairments
identify the risk of adverse events in patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disorders to facilitate just-in-time intervention
detect malignant oral cancer tumors in fluorescence endoscopic images
track mental stress levels in the long term to better facilitate biofeedback treatment options
detect sleep disorders using minimally invasive sensors

My Grants

V. Sethu, B. Ahmed, 'Hardware Signal Processing Lab for Signal Information and Machine Intelligence', UNSW Research Infrastructure Scheme, Sep 2020 - Aug 2021, $197,470
B. Kelly, C. Diskin, B. Ahmed, J. Arciuli, K. Ballard, T. Benders, D. Burnham, F. Cox, 'Life in Lockdown: Australian Children's Stories of the Covid-19 Pandemic', University of Melbourne Arts Collaborative Research Seed Funding, Jul - Dec 2020, $18,321
B. Ahmed, K. Ballard, J. Epps, ‘Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Low Resource Populations’, ARC Discovery Program (DP) Grant, Jan 2021 – Dec 2023, Australian Research Council, $350,000
V. Sethu, B. Ahmed, 'Exploratory Analysis of Stochastic Time Series Models of Satellite Communication Links', Defence Science Technology Group Grant, Jan - May 2020, $53,539
B. Ahmed, V. Sethu, ‘Computational Decision Making for Satellite Communications for Defence’, Defence Science Technology Group Grant, May 2019, $18,800
B. Ahmed, H. Brodaty, J. Epps, N. Kochan, M. Valenzuela, K. Ballard, 'Developing a Paralinguistic Plus Episodic Memory Screening Tool to Detect and Track Cognitive Impairment in the Elderly', UNSW Biomedical Engineering Seed Fund, Aug 2019 – July 2022, $450,000
B. Ahmed, K. Ballard, D. Burnham, J. Epps, F. Cox, V. Sethu, K. Demuth, J. Arciuli, B. Kelly, C. Diskin, T. Benders, C.B. Lee, E. Ambikairajah, E. Baker, ‘Little Kids, Big Talk, Wide Applications: An Audio-Visual Child Speech Corpus for Applications to Assist the Developing Child’, ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) Grant, Jun 2019 – Jun 2020, Australian Research Council, $1,060,000
B. Ahmed, J. Epps, D. Smith, A. Duenser, ‘Towards Domain-Independent Low-level Pronunciation Verification with Rich and Informative Feedback’, CSIRO - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation/Data61 - Scholarships Program, Jan 2019 – Dec 2021, $35,000
B. Ahmed, R. Gutierrez-Osuna, K. Ballard, ‘Apraxia World: An Interactive, Technology-based Comprehensive Tool for Remote Speech Therapy of Childhood Apraxia of Speech’, National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2015 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Feb 2016 – Dec 2019, US $809,692
J. Jo, B. Ahmed, N. Rajpoot, Z. Dogan, H. Al-Enazi, ‘Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Endoscope for Early Detection of Oral Cancer’, National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2015 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Feb 2016 – Dec 2019, US $809,465
B. Ahmed, D. Cvetkovic, E. Jovanov, T. Penzel, G. Kennedy, ‘The Development of a Clinician’s Aide to Monitor and Screen for Insomnia’, National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2012 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Jan 2013 – Feb 2016, US $1,049,353
R. Gutierrez-Osuna, B. Ahmed, E. Shipp, ‘Promoting Stress Self-regulation with Physiological Training Games’ National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2012 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Jan 2013 – Jan 2017, US $1,049,334
B. Ahmed, R. Gutierrez-Osuna, K. Ballard, ‘Mobile Infrastructure and Automated Tools for the Monitoring and Treatment of Childhood Apraxia of Speech’, National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2011 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Dec 2011 – Oct 2015, US $1,040,975
R. Gutierrez-Osuna, B. Ahmed, ‘Stress Monitoring with Non-linear Dynamical Models and Wearable Sensors’, Principal Investigator National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) 2008 Award, Qatar National Research Fund, Sept 2009 - Aug 2012, US $1,046,123

My Awards

Superstar of STEM, Science and Technology Australia, 2019
Texas A&M University at Qatar Teaching Award, 2017
Best Qatar National Research Fund Undergraduate Research Experience Project (2012) – ‘An Investigation into Skills Requiring Enhancement in Qatari High School Students to Succeed in an Engineering Education’
Best paper award at IEEE Educon, April 2011, for paper ‘Robotics: Its Effectiveness as a Tool to Teach Engineering Design and Computer Programming’
Winner, Visualization Development Competition 2009, "Simulation of Brain Wave Activity"
Recipient of Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) for Ph.D

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

speech

digital signal processing (dsp)

biomedical signal processing

Areas of supervision

My research lies at the intersection of engineering and healthcare, driven by the desire to make healthcare accessible to all. It uses signal processing and machine learning to investigate how different conditions impact speech and other biomedical signals to develop better diagnostic and therapeutic tools, all guided by the users, both clinicians and patients. Recently I have been exploring how to process disordered speech to identify the risk of dementia from speech and develop assessment & therapeutic tools for people with speech disorders. As these are all areas with limited size datasets, this involves developing novel transfer learning techniques that effectively transfer knowledge from high resource domains to low resource domain to reduce the need for labelled data as well as high performance unsupervised learning methods. My research has led to startup Say66, which uses AI to make speech therapy accessible and effective.

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in these areas, please feel free to contact me!

My Teaching

My priority in teaching is to enrich students' experience with the use of active learning approaches that promote deeper learning and maximise content retention. I teach primarily design based courses where students learn how to apply electrical engineering knowledge in hands on projects that take them through the various steps of the complete design cycle.

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