|
 |
Stella Alumonah, a sophomore majoring in Electrical Engineering |
|
Stella Alumonah, a sophomore majoring in Electrical Engineering, presented her summer research on speech timing and brain activity at the 2025 UMD-REACH program reception hosted by the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Alumonah, a participant in the Research, Equity, and Access in Communication and Hearing (REACH) program, is advised by Professor Jonathan Simon (ISR/ECE/Biology). Her project, “Automated Word Timing from Speech Audio for Brain Signal Analysis,” focused on improving the efficiency and accuracy of aligning spoken words to brain responses in magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments.
She compared the output of four speech-to-text alignment systems: Montreal Forced Aligner, Vosk, WhisperX, and Wav2Vec2. Alumonah developed a method to combine their results and fit them to transcripts in which a human listener had carefully marked the exact moment each word was spoken. She used linear regression to refine the predictions. The combined model estimated word onsets with higher accuracy than any single system and offered reliable timing precision suitable for many MEG-based analyses.
This advancement in automated timestamp generation is expected to significantly reduce the time researchers spend on manual audio alignment and support large-scale studies of how the brain processes language.
“Ms. Alumonah produced impressive results, and even more so in the short time of the summer REACH program. When we put her model into our brain analysis pipeline, they produced output that was on par with the manually annotated data, but only took a small fraction of the time to compute,” Simon said.
 Alumonah, a Baltimore County native, is a member of the Black Engineers Society and recently joined the QUEST Honors Program. She plans to specialize in signal processing and control systems, with aspirations to pursue graduate study and apply engineering to the biomedical and medical device fields.
Her work was conducted in the Computational Auditory Neural Systems Laboratory, part of ISR’s neuroscience and signal processing research ecosystem. The lab focuses on understanding how the brain encodes and interprets auditory information.
Alumonah’s participation in the REACH program reflects ISR’s commitment to inclusive research opportunities and the development of future leaders in systems engineering and neuroscience.
Related Articles:
Alumnus David Bader Named Association for Computing Machinery Fellow
$1.14M from the State of Maryland will Match Private Donation to Establish Two Brendan Iribe Endowed Professorships in ECE and CS at UMD
Alumni Profile: Yijie Han
Professor Espy-Wilson Named IEEE Fellow
ECE Names 2021 Distinguished Alumni
Min Wu Elected President of IEEE Signal Processing Society
Alumnus Chaitali Chakrabarti Wins ASU’s Joseph C. Palais Distinguished Faculty Scholar Award
Alumnus David Bader Receives 2021 Sidney Fernbach Award
In Memoriam: John William Fritz (‘17, electrical engineering)
ECE Alumnus Xiaojiang (James) Du Named Anson Wood Burchard Endowed-Chair Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology
July 29, 2025
|
