Background

I am a Computing and Information Sciences Ph.D. candidate at Rochester Institute of Technology, working with Professor Cecilia O. Alm in the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab (CLaSP). My research focuses on interactive machine learning and federated learning for multimodal affective computing.

Research Interests

My research interests include multimodal machine learning, interactive machine learning, affective computing, natural language/speech processing, personalized federated learning, and Reinforcement Learning for human behavioral modeling.

News

(07/2026): Decmo accepted to ACII 2026
(02/2026): Journal article accepted at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
(09/2025): Journal article accepted at IEEE Access
(02/2024): Paper accepted at LREC-COLING 2024
(07/2023): Demo accepted to ACII 2023
(11/2022): Poster accepted to SIGCSE 2023
(08/2022): Accepted to the ACII 2022 Doctoral Consortium
(07/2022): Workshop paper accepted at 2nd HCI+NLP Workshop (at NAACL 2022)
(05/2022): Passed Research Potential Assessment (RPA)
(03/2022): Demo paper accepted at EmoCHI’22

Publications

Rajesh Titung and Cecilia O. Alm. 2026. Personalized Federated Learning for Session-based Affective Interaction Modeling. In IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 17. [pdf]
Faithful C. Onwuegbuche*, Rajesh Titung*, Esa M. Rantanen, Anca D. Jurcut, Cecilia O. Alm and Liliana Pasquale. 2025. Securing the Weakest Link: Exploring Affective States Exploited in Phishing Emails With Large Language Models. In IEEE Access, vol. 13. [pdf]
Rajesh Titung and Cecilia O. Alm. 2024. FUSE - FrUstration and Surprise Expressions: A Subtle Emotional Multimodal Language Corpus. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING). [pdf]
Isabelle Arthur, Jordan Quinn, Rajesh Titung, Cecilia O. Alm, and Reynold Bailey. 2023. MDE - Multimodal Data Explorer for Flexible Visualization of Multiple Data Streams. (demo). ACII 2023: 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW). [pdf]
Cecilia O. Alm, Rajesh Titung, and Reynold Bailey. 2023. Pandemic Impacts on Assessment of Undergraduate Research. (poster). SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. [pdf]
Rajesh Titung. 2022. Interactive Machine Learning for Multimodal Affective Computing. In Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium of 10th International Conference on Affective Computing Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2022). [pdf]
Rajesh Titung and Cecilia O. Alm. 2022. Teaching interactively to learn emotions in natural language. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, pages 40–46, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf]

Extended Abstracts without Proceedings

Cecilia O. Alm and Rajesh Titung. 2022. Engaging human interactions to learn emotions. EmoCHI’22.

Mentoring

Graduate (MS):

Multimodal interpretability analysis (Ajay Gopi; Parth Kapur; Shubh Sehgal)
Collaborative linguistic analysis platform (Pavan Kumar Bellam)
Capstone: detecting linguistic signals of surprise and frustration in speech audio (Ketaki Tilak)

Undergraduate (BS):

Multimodal data visualization platform (Isabelle Arthur; Jordan Quinn)
NSF REU Site — co-mentored 10 undergraduate students

Teaching

I have served as Graduate Teaching Assistant for the following graduate level courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology:

ENGL 681 Natural Language Processing I (Fall 2022)
IDAI 610 Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)
CSCI 716 Computational Geometry (Fall 2025)
IDAI 780 Capstone Project (Spring 2025, Spring 2026)