Dr Lakshmi Babu Saheer

Lakshmi is the director of the Computing, Informatics and Applications Research Group, with expertise in applications of artificial intelligence in the domains of climate change, net zero, air quality, vegetation/terrain identification, audio, speech, NLP, IoT and healthcare. She has numerous publications and prestigious awards to her credit including Google's Anita Borg award, and funding from several EU (FP7, Eureka and Hasler Innovation start-up) funds. She is currently leading multiple climate action projects with Local Authorities in the UK.

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Background

Coming from an industrial background, Lakshmi has been focussing her research on Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence mainly in the domains of Climate Change, NetZero, Air quality, Vegetation & Terrain Identification, Sustainable Food Supply Chain, Audio, Speech, NLP, IoT, Biomedical and Healthcare. She has more than 20+ years of applied and academic research experience working at different prestigious international organizations. She is currently working with local authorities in UK on NetZero, Climate Change and Digital healthcare related topics through ARU-QR funds.

Lakshmi has to her credit numerous reputed journal and conference publications. She is a guest editor for MDPI special edition journal on Sustainability and official reviewer of NIHR & other funding applications, IEEE/Eurasip journals, major conferences and workshops in her domain. Google Anita Borg award, Hasler Innovation project funding (worth 150,000 CHF) for her own start-up initiative, VentureKick Award, and the Ark Grant represents a sample of the awards she has received, as well as EU (Eureka, Hasler and FP7) funding for her doctoral and post-doctoral research.

Spoken Languages

• English
• Malayalam
• Hindi
• Tamil

Research interests

• Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications
• AI for Climate Change, NetZero policies, Clean Energy and Sustainability
• Air quality monitoring and modelling
• Computer Vision, Urban green spaces, Vegetation & Terrain Identification using Satellite images
• AI in Biomedical, Healthcare and Internet of Things (IoT) based systems
• Natural Language Processing and Understanding
• Audio processing and environmental sounds recognition
• Speech Technologies, and Affective Computing
• Signal Processing & Pattern Recognition/Classification
• Project Management mainly agile and lean ways of working

Areas of expertise

• Artificial Intelligence
• Sustainability and Climate Change
• Biomedical
• Healthcare
• Computer Vision, Speech and Audio

Areas of research supervision

Current PhD supervision

• Lorenzo Garbagna (2022-Present), Urban green routing and micro-climate modeling (L. Babu Saheer, M. Maktabdar, A. Greig)
• Holly Burrows (2022-Present), IoMT-based respiratory healthcare monitoring (I. Van-der-Linde, M. Maktabdar, L. Babu Saheer)
• Seyedehrazieh Ehsaniamrei (2021-Present), Modelling and optimizing carbon emission factors in food supply chain using artificial intelligence (L. Babu Saheer, C. Luca)
• Phra Aktar (2020-Present), Impacts of digitization of jobs on employee wellbeing in higher education sector in UK (S. Dhar-Bhattacharjee, L. Babu Saheer, C. Ivory)
• Henry Mkpa Akpanakak (2019-Present), IoT health monitoring network (G. Wilson, A. Winckles, L. Babu Saheer)

Past PhD supervision (completed)

• Moruf Adebowale (2020) An Intelligent Phishing Detection and Protection Scheme using a fusion of Images, Frames and Text (G. Wilson, L. Babu Saheer)

PhD examination:

• Vitaliy Milke (2022), Intraday Machine Learning for the Securities Market, School of Computing and Information Science
• Ahmed Selim (2020). Neural Networks for EEG-based Brain Computer Interfaces, School of Computing and Information Science

Other ARU-QR funding and Masters/Undergraduate projects

• Green and NetZero policies in collaboration with Colchester borough council
• Green routing in collaboration with Colchester borough council
• Air quality monitoring and modeling in collaboration with Colchester borough council
• IoMT-based elderly care in collaboration with Essex county council and industrial partners
• Speech and Natural Language Processing in collaboration with industrial partners
• Several Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications.

Teaching

• MSc AI with Cyber Security (Course Leader)
• MSc AI and Big Data
• BSc Data Science Apprenticeship degree
• Advanced Machine Learning
• Neural Computing and Deep Learning
• Applications of AI
• Computer modelling and Simulation
• Introduction to Data Science and Programming

Qualifications

• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) & Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland
• M.S in Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
• B.Tech in Computer Science, Cochin University of Science & Technology, India
• Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning, (PGCert), Anglia Ruskin University, UK.

Memberships, editorial boards

• Fellow, Higher Education Academy (FHEA)
• Member IEEE (MIEEE) and IEEE SPS membership since 2008
• Guest Editor for MDPI Sustainability Journal
• Member of the Google Women Techmakers
• Certified Scrum Master 2017
• Google Anita Borg Scholar 2011

Research grants, consultancy, knowledge exchange

• Two ARU themes funds - sustainable futures and Health & well-being themes worth ~£20,000 in 2022
• Five projects with ARU-QR funds in 2022 & 2021 worth ¬£50,000 for AI application projects
• Two VC-PhD funding at ARU 2022
• Hasler Innovation Project Funding (150,000 CHF) as PI for start-up funding in 2014
• Venturekick (10K CHF) and The Ark Grant (10K CHF)
• Google Anita Borg Scholarship (10K Euros) recipient 2011

Selected recent publications

Babu Saheer, L., Bhasy, A., Maktab-Dar-Oghaz, M., and Zarrin, J., 2022. Data Driven Framework for Understanding and Predicting Air Quality in Urban Areas, Frontiers in Big Data, Special issue on Statistical Learning for Predicting Air Quality, Volume 5.

Burrows, H., Zarrin, J., Babu Saheer, L., and Maktab-Dar-Oghaz, M., 2022. Realtime Emotional Reflective User Interface Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Generative Adversarial Networks, Electronics 2022, 11(1):118.

Zarrin, J., Phang, H., W., Babu Saheer, L., and Zarrin, B., 2021. Blockchain for decentralization of internet: prospects, trends, and challenges. Cluster Computing, 1-26, Springer US.

Babu Saheer, L., Yamagishi, J. Garner, P. N., Dines, J., 2014. Combining vocal tract length normalization with hierarchial linear transformations. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 8(2), Special Issue on Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis, pp. 262-272.

Dines, J., Liang, H., Babu Saheer, L., et al, 2013. Personalising speech-to-speech translation: Unsupervised cross-lingual speaker adaptation for HMM-based speech synthesis. Computer Speech & Language Processing, 27(2), Special Issue on Speech-to-Speech Translation, pp. 428–437.

Babu Saheer, L., Dines, J., Garner, P. N., 2012. Vocal tract length normalization for statistical parametric speech synthesis. IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 20:7.

Bourlard, H., Dines, J., Magimai-Doss, M., Garner, P. N., Imseng, D., Motlicek, P., Liang, H., Babu Saheer, L., Valente, F., 2011. Current trends in multilingual speech processing. SADHANA, 36(5), pp. 885–915.

Sarada, G. L., Babu Saheer, L., Nagarajan, T., Murthy, H. A., 2009. Automatic transcription of continuous speech into syllable-like units for Indian languages. Proc. of SADHANA, Journal on Academy proceedings, 34, pp. 221–233.

Recent presentations and conferences

Thinde, R. and Babu Saheer, L., 2022. Retrospective Analysis of Global Carbon dioxide Emissions and Energy Consumption, Computing Conference, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Springer.

Maktab-Dar-Oghaz, M., Babu Saheer, L., and Zarrin, J., 2022. Urban Tree Detection and Species Classification Using Aerial Imagery, Computing Conference, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Springer.

Rakhymzhan, T., Zarrin, J., Maktab-Dar-Oghaz, M., and, Babu Saheer, L., 2022. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-Ray Images using ResNetV2, Computing Conference, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Springer.

Garbagna, L., Burrows, H., Babu Saheer, L., and Zarrin, J., 2022. Mask Compliance Detection on Facial Images, Computing Conference, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Springer. (Best Student Paper Award Nomination)

Babu Saheer, L. and Shahawy, M., 2021. Self-supervised approach for urban tree recognition on aerial images. In Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations. AIAI 2021 IFIP WG 12.5 International Workshops, eds. I. Maglogiannis, J. Macintyre, and L. Iliadis (Cham: Springer International Publishing), 476–486.

Waters, E., Maktab-Dar-Oghaz, M., and Babu Saheer, L., 2021. Urban tree species classification using aerial imagery. In: International Conference on Machine Learning 2021, Workshop Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.

Muhammad, U., and Babu Saheer, L., and Zarrin, J., 2021. Forest Terrain Identification using Semantic Segmentation on UAV Images. In: International Conference on Machine Learning 2021, Workshop Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.

Babu Saheer, L., Shahawy, M., and Zarrin, J., 2020. Mining and Analysis of Air Quality Data to Aid Climate Change. In Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations (AIAI 2020), IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 585. Springer, Cham.

Babu Saheer, L., Na, X., and Cernak, M., 2015. Syllabic Pitch Tuning for Neutral-to-Emotional Voice Conversion, Idiap Research Report.

Babu Saheer, L., and Cernak, M., 2013. Automatic Staging of Audio with Emotions, in proceedings of IEEE International conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Geneva.

Babu Saheer L., and Potard, B., 2013. Understanding factors in emotion perception. In Proceedings of 8th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, pages 59–64, Barcelona, Spain.

Babu Saheer, L., Yamagishi, J., Dines, J., and Garner, P., N., 2012. Combining vocal tract length normalization with hierarchical linear transformations, in proceedings of ICASSP, Kyoto.

Babu Saheer, L., Dines, J., Garner, P., N., and Liang, H., 2010. Implementation of VTLN for statistical speech synthesis, in proceedings of 7th ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, Kyoto.

Media experience

AIAI 2020 Presentation on Air quality analysis.

Several press articles in the Swiss media covering her start-up initiatives including Bilan Top 50 Start-up, Venture Business Plan Top25, STARTUP.ch runners up, IMD Start-up Competition Award, ICC 2012 Prizes.