Jialu Li

Jialu Li is a tenure-track assistant professor in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona, starting Fall 2025. She received her BS and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was advised by Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson. She also spent time visiting the WAV Lab at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Professor Shinji Watanabe. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary speech applications for monitoring infant psychological development and identifying children at risk of autism. She has been recognized with the Beckman Graduate Fellowship and the ECE Rambus Fellowship, and was a top-two finalist in ECE for the Graduate Dissertation Completion Fellowship at UIUC.

Courses

• INFO 621: Advanced Machine Learning Applications

Select Publications

Li, J., Hasegawa-Johnson, M., McElwain, N.L. (2023) Towards Robust Family-Infant Audio Analysis Based on Unsupervised Pretraining of Wav2vec 2.0 on Large-Scale Unlabeled Family Audio. Proc. Interspeech 2023, 1035-1039, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-460

Li, J., Hasegawa-Johnson, M., Karahalios, K. (2024) Enhancing Child Vocalization Classification with Phonetically-Tuned Embeddings for Assisting Autism Diagnosis. Proc. Interspeech 2024, 5163-5167, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2024-540

Honors & Awards

• Beckman Graduate Fellowship
• ECE Rambus Fellowship
• Finalist for the Graduate Dissertation Completion Fellowship