Author: Michelle Cohn

I’m thrilled to share that we’ve been awarded a collaborative NIH R01 through the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) — with Shijia Pan, Alyssa Weakley, PhD, & Chen-Nee Chuah!

Our project, “SCH: HOME: Health-Oriented Monitoring Empowered by Multimodal Cyber-Physical Systems for Geriatric Care,” will develop a multi-agent system that integrates multimodal sensing, adaptive learning, and human-in-the-loop intelligence to support older adults’ health and care at home. As a co-I, I’ll be analyzing older adults’ speech and other vocalizations during these interactions.

Thank you to the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute for early support for these collaborations.

New funding could help older adults age in place while giving caregivers greater peace of mind.

I’m thrilled that alongside my co-authors — Mahima Pushkarna, Mark Díaz, Joscelin Cooper, Femi Olanubi, Joseph Moran, Zion Mengesh, & Courtney Heldreth — our paper, Age and generational differences in anthropomorphism and trust in large language models, has been accepted to a Frontiers in Cognition special issue: Exploring human-likeness in AI: From perception to ethics and interaction dynamics.

I’m thrilled that our paper, led by Kenyu Ikeuchi, Cross-linguistic acoustic biomarkers of cognitive impairment across interactive and single-speaker speech tasks, was accepted to the 48th International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)!

Citation:

Ikeuchi, K., Ohtsuki, Cohn, M., Weakley, A., Ishihara, Y., Hoang, J., Kishimoto, T., Tomaszewski Farias, S., Vonk, J., Chuah, C. (Accepted). Cross-linguistic acoustic biomarkers of cognitive impairment across interactive and single-speaker speech tasks. 48th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Toronto, Canada.

I’m excited to share that our abstract has been accepted to the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) — we’ll be presenting in London this July!

Acoustic properties associated with cognitive impairment and APOE-ε4 status in older adults
Michelle Cohn, Jet M.J. Vonk, Joseph Hoang, Yui Ishihara, Kenyu Ikeuchi, Noah Michelson, Timothy Keroles, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh L. Meyer, Dana Farias, Georgia Zellou, Alyssa Weakley

I’m very excited that 5 posters were accepted to the UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference for 10 of my undergraduate mentees across three areas of research:

Speech and cognitive impairment

• [Team poster] Undergrads: Noah Michelson, Kelley Ramirez, Gabi Tapia, Tim Keroles, Quinn Alarcon, Macie Gard, Mars Lake, Faith Orellana: Characterizing Speech Changes Associated with Cognitive Impairment in Autobiographical Narratives.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.

• Undergrads: Tim Keroles, Noah Michelson: Exploring Lexical Predictors of Cognitive Impairment and APOE-ε4 Risk.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.
• Undergrads: Kelley Ramirez, Noah Michelson: Predicting ASR Word Errors Among Older Adults Varying Cognitive Status and Language.
  • Additional faculty support: Alyssa Weakley, Sarah Tomaszewski Farias, Jet M.J. Vonk, Chen-Nee Chuah, Oanh Meyer, & Georgia Zellou.

Speech perception

• Undergrad: Pranaya Rao Ganta: Anticipatory Vowel Nasalization in California English: Exploring the Production-Perception Link with Eye-Tracking.
  • Additional faculty support: Georgia Zellou

Computational approaches

• Undergrad: Laasya Babbellapati: Examining how Wav2Vec Embeddings Encode Vowel Duration.
  • Additional faculty support: Georgia Zellou

I’m thrilled that along with my co-authors, Alyssa Lanzi, Yui Ishihara, Chen-Nee Chuah, Georgia Zellou, and Alyssa Weakley, our paper “Challenges in Automatic Speech Recognition for Adults with Cognitive Impairment” was accepted to CHI 2026.

I’m thrilled that, along with co-PIs Dr. Alyssa Weakely (UC Davis Neurology) and Dr. Chen-Nee Chuah (UC Davis Computer Science), our grant was one of 6 selected for funding.

Interpretable Acoustic- and LLM-based Cognitive Impairment Detection in Older Adults.

• Lead PI: Cohn. Co-PIs: Chuah & Weakley.

I’m thrilled that my project, along with Georgia Zellou (Prof., UC Davis Linguistics), was one of four grants selected for a Translated Imminent Grant!

Voices We Trust: How L1 and L2 English Speakers Judge LLM Translation Accuracy

• PI: Cohn, Assistant Project Scientist, UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics,
• co-PI Zellou, Professor, UC Davis Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics 

I’m thrilled to start as a Specialist with the Vonk Lab at the UCSF Fein Memory and Aging Center. I will be working on a project investigating automated speech analyses to probe cognitive impairment.

I gave an invited colloquium for the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Linguistic Department in November, “Impact of AI on Language”.