Speech and Emotion Recognition Researcher Named IEEE Fellow

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently named Dr. Carlos Busso, professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, a fellow. The prestigious designation recognizes Busso’s contributions in human-centered machine applications.

IEEE is one of the most influential professional organizations, and achieving the rank of fellow is a major accomplishment. Just .1 percent of the organization’s members are named fellows each year.

“Professor Busso has made stellar contributions to speech and multimodal emotion recognition and is considered one of the top researchers in the world,” said Dr. Dinesh Bhatia, professor and interim co-head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “His publication citation record shows the importance of his fundamental contributions. Furthermore, his research tremendously impacts the emerging virtual agent-development community. Besides being a top researcher, Dr. Busso is a respected teacher for our undergraduate students.”

Busso directs the Multimodal Signal Processing Laboratory, where his work focuses on making technical applications more human friendly, enabling robots to detect emotions and vehicles that are more sensitive to changes in driver behavior. Because people communicate in multiple modalities, researchers focus on a number of human cues that technical applications can recognize.

“My team has worked in this area for the last 19 years,” Busso said. “I have several best paper awards, the most recent one being the 2021 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. My team has also developed several databases that are widely used by the community.”

“Professor Busso has made stellar contributions to speech and multimodal emotion recognition and is considered one of the top researchers in the world.”

Dr. Dinesh Bhatia
Professor and Interim Co-Head of the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering

His work includes the areas of affective computing, multimodal human-machine interfaces, in-vehicle active safety systems and machine learning systems for multimodal processing. He earned a CAREER award in 2015 for his work, and he has also supported several high-performing undergraduate researchers.

“My previous and current undergraduate, master and PhD students are key reasons for our success,” Busso emphasized. “The brainstorming meetings with them are some of the most exciting moments of my job here at UT Dallas. These discussions have led to many of the contributions that resulted in this recognition.”

Busso continued, “Several people have played a key role in my career. Dr. Shrikanth Narayanan was my PhD advisor at the University of Southern California, and he continues to be a truly remarkable mentor in all aspects. I also thank Dr. Néstor Becerra Yoma at the University of Chile, who was my mentor for my master’s degree. He opened many doors for me in my career. Here at UT Dallas, Dr. John Hansen has served as a mentor since I joined. I could have not asked for a better mentor. I also want to recognize my family for supporting me throughout my career.”

Busso earned BS and MS degrees with high honors in electrical engineering from the University of Chile, Santiago, Chile, and his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California. Both Busso and his colleague Dr. Bilal Akin, also a electrical and computer engineering professor, were named IEEE fellows in 2023.