Background

I am a Computing and Information Sciences Ph.D. student 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

(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

Education

Ph.D. in Computing and Information Sciences(2021 - in progress)

Rochester Institute of TechnologyRochester, NY, USA

Bachelor in Computer Engineering(2013 - 2017)

Pulchowk Campus, Institute of EngineeringLalitpur, Nepal

Work Experience

Graduate Research Assistant(August 2021 - Present)

Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab, RITRochester, NY, USA

Conducted an IRB-approved multimodal data collection experiment using several human tasks to study the subtleness of emotion expressions.
Investigated the benefits and trade-offs of interactive machine learning approaches, including active learning and machine teaching, for advancing affective computing.
Exploring federated learning and interactive machine learning to enhance the personalization and generalization of behavioral models representing extremely diverse human behavioral expressions and perceptions.

Graduate Teaching Assistant(August 2023 - December 2023)

Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, RITRochester, NY, USA

Co-prepared problem sets reflecting various concepts in Artificial Intelligence
Created video tutorials on transfer learning, large multimodal models (LMMs), large language models (LLMs), and fine-tuning techniques for LLMs.
Grader for technical problem sets and reading assignments (written critiques of published research papers)
TA office hours

Visiting Researcher(October 2023 - November 2023)

ML-LabsDublin, Ireland

Conducting research and co-authored dissemination with collaborators at University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin City University (DCU), and Technological University Dublin (TUD).
Using generative LLMs to investigate psychological vulnerabilities in phishing emails

Machine Learning Engineer(July 2018 - July 2021)

Fusemachines NepalKathmandu, Nepal

Led a team on Zendesk-based automated reply system
Co-led a team on a information retrieval system for a construction project leads and analytic company
Prepared NLP, RL, and CS course materials for Fusemachines Nanodegree

Publications

Rajesh Titung and Cecilia O. Alm. Forthcoming (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.

Technical Skills

Languages: English, Nepali, Tamang, Hindi
Programming Languages: Python, Java, C/C++, SQL (Postgres),MongoDB
Libraries: Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, Keras, Pytorch, OpenAI Gym, nltk, spacy, transformers, peft
Tools: Pandas, Matplotlib, NumPy, Seaborn, Matlab, Jupyter Notebook, conda, pipenv, cookiecutter, FLask
Developer Tools: Git, Docker, Atom, AWS, Jira
Hardware/Sensory Equipments: Pupil Labs Pupil Core Eye tracker, SMI screen-based eye tracker, Tascam audio/speech recorders, GSR Shimmer3 wearable sensors
Softwares: iMotions, Praat