Tiantian Feng

SAIL Lab, University of Southern California. tiantiaf@usc.edu (till end of 2026), tiantiaf@gmail.com

tiantiaf.jpeg

This amazing picture was taken by my wife at Skyline Trail, Mount Rainier, 2023.

PS: Prepare enough water for this trail but make sure you are not the one carrying it.

My name is Tiantian Feng, and I completed my Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at University of Southern California in 2024, and I am currently a postdoc researcher in SAIL lab at USC. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Shrikanth Narayanan. I will be soon joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen) as an assistant professor, and I am activity recruiting prospective students to join my research group. Feel free to send me your information at tiantiaf@gmail.com.

My research is about AI+Human Lifespan+Digital Health, and my approach is full-stack AI that includes sensor technology, machine learning, and human experiences to understand natural human conditions in healthcare applications across life span. Notably, I have involved in projects studying children with autism, workplace behavior of hospital professionals, aging population with cognitive decline, people with hearing loss, and mental health (e.g. Postpartum depression (PPD)).

I also have a particular interest in building technology that is private and broadly accessible. I have been focused on developing datasets and benchmark that are shareable across different community. My research invovles applications such as speech understanding, wearable computing, multimodal understanding, and bio-signal processing, etc. Additionally, I have hands-on experience in industrial sensor design and deploying sensors in research studies. I have interned at both Meta and Amazon as the research scientist.

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to collaborate.

News

Apr 15, 2026 I am excited to share that I will be joining the Chinese University of Hong Kong - Shenzhen as an assistant professor later this year! I am actively recruiting students to join my research group.
Jan 20, 2026 Four of my co-authored papers have been accepted to ICASSP! The topics include speech privacy, speech synthesis, speech encoding, and applications of speech emotion recognition.
Jan 10, 2026 My preprint paper VoxCog: Towards End-to-End Multilingual Cognitive Impairment Classification through Dialectal Knowledge is now available online.
Dec 31, 2025 My co-authored paper Speech acoustics to rt-MRI articulatory dynamics inversion with video diffusion model. has been published at Computer Speech & Language (2025).
Dec 10, 2025 I will give a talk on-Developing Robust Speaker Diarization for Child-Adult Dyadic Interaction in ASRU 2025 Satellite Workshop-AI for Children’s Speech and Language!
Nov 23, 2025 Our Voxlect benchmark has been accepted to 2026 KDD Dataset and Benchmark track, congratulations to all co-authors!
Nov 14, 2025 I will be giving an invited talk on “Toward Human-Centered Computing for Behavioral Understanding in Healthcare Applications” to THE Ohio State University Talk Details!
Aug 20, 2025 7 papers accepted and will be presented at INTERSPEECH 2025! The topics include speech datasets for science, child speech classification, child speech-LLMs, child speech ASR, multimodal child behavior understanding, categorized speech emotion recognition, and arousal-valence speech recognition.
Aug 20, 2025 Our work has won the 2nd place in 2025 INTERSPEECH Speech Emotion Recognition Challenge - Task1!
Aug 20, 2025 Our work has won the 1st place in 2025 INTERSPEECH Speech Emotion Recognition Challenge - Task2!

Selected Publications

  1. Speech AI Benchmark
    Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe
    Tiantian Feng , Kevin Huang , Anfeng Xu , Xuan Shi , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Jihwan Lee , Yoonjeong Lee , Dani Byrd , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    Accepted to 2026 KDD Dataset and Benchmark Track, 2026
  2. Trustworthy AI Benchmark
    FedMultimodal: A Benchmark for Multimodal Federated Learning
    Tiantian Feng , Digbalay Bose , Tuo Zhang , Rajat Hebbar , Anil Ramakrishna , Rahul Gupta , Mi Zhang , Salman Avestimehr , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In 2023 KDD , 2023
  3. Digital Health Speech AI
    VoxCog: Towards End-to-End Multilingual Cognitive Impairment Classification through Dialectal Knowledge
    Tiantian Feng , Anfeng Xu , Jinkook Lee , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    Under review, 2026
  4. Speech AI Benchmark
    Vox-Profile: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Characterizing Diverse Speaker and Speech Traits
    Tiantian Feng , Jihwan Lee , Anfeng Xu , Yoonjeong Lee , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Xuan Shi , Helin Wang , Thomas Thebaud , Laureano Moro-Velazquez , Dani Byrd , and 1 more author
    Under review, 2025
  5. Dataset Digital Health
    TILES-2018 Sleep Benchmark Dataset: A Longitudinal Wearable Sleep Data Set of Hospital Workers for Modeling and Understanding Sleep Behaviors
    Tiantian Feng , Brandon M Booth , Karel Mundnich , Emily Zhou , Benjamin Girault , Kristina Lerman , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    Under Review, 2025
  6. Dataset Digital Health
    TILES-2018, a longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of hospital workers
    Karel Mundnich , Brandon M Booth , Michelle l’Hommedieu , Tiantian Feng , Benjamin Girault , Justin L’hommedieu , Mackenzie Wildman , Sophia Skaaden , Amrutha Nadarajan , Jennifer L Villatte , and 1 more author
    Scientific Data, 2020
  7. Dataset Digital Health
    TILES-2019: A longitudinal physiologic and behavioral data set of medical residents in an intensive care unit
    Joanna C Yau , Benjamin Girault , Tiantian Feng , Karel Mundnich , Amrutha Nadarajan , Brandon M Booth , Emilio Ferrara , Kristina Lerman , Eric Hsieh , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    Scientific Data, 2022
  8. Challenge Winner Speech Emotion
    Developing a Top-tier Framework in Naturalistic Conditions Challenge for Categorized Emotion Prediction: From Speech Foundation Models and Learning Objective to Data Augmentation and Engineering Choices
    Tiantian Feng , Thanathai Lertpetchpun , Dani Byrd , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In Interspeech 2025 , 2025
  9. Digital Health INTERSPEECH 2025
    Egocentric Speaker Classification in Child-Adult Dyadic Interactions: From Sensing to Computational Modeling
    Tiantian Feng , Anfeng Xu , Xuan Shi , Somer Bishop , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In Interspeech 2025 , 2025
  10. Dataset Multimedia
    MM-AU: Towards Multimodal Understanding of Advertisement Videos
    Digbalay Bose , Rajat Hebbar , Tiantian Feng , Krishna Somandepalli , Anfeng Xu , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In ACM Multimedia , 2023
  11. Trustworthy AI Generative AI
    Can Text-to-image Model Assist Multi-modal Learning for Visual Recognition with Visual Modality Missing?
    Tiantian Feng , Daniel Yang , Digbalay Bose , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    ICMI, 2024
  12. Voice Privacy Generative AI
    Unlocking Foundation Models for Privacy-Enhancing Speech Understanding: An Early Study on Low Resource Speech Training Leveraging Label-guided Synthetic Speech Content
    Tiantian Feng , Digbalay Bose , Xuan Shi , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    INTERSPEECH, 2023
  13. CVPRW Generative AI
    GPT-FL: Generative pre-trained model-assisted federated learning
    Tuo Zhang* , Tiantian Feng* , Samiul Alam , Mi Zhang , Shrikanth S Narayanan , and Salman Avestimehr
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.02210, 2023
  14. Speech AI Trustworthy AI
    A Review of Speech-centric Trustworthy Machine Learning: Privacy, Safety, and Fairness
    Tiantian Feng , Rajat Hebbar , Nicholas Mehlman , Xuan Shi , Aditya Kommineni , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, 2023
  15. ICASSP 2023 Federated Learning
    FedAudio: A federated learning benchmark for audio tasks
    Tuo Zhang , Tiantian Feng , Samiul Alam , Sunwoo Lee , Mi Zhang , Shrikanth S Narayanan , and Salman Avestimehr
    In ICASSP 2023-2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2023
  16. INTERSPEECH 2022 Federated Learning
    User-Level Differential Privacy against Attribute Inference Attack of Speech Emotion Recognition on Federated Learning
    Tiantian Feng , Raghuveer Peri , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In Proc. Interspeech 2022 , 2022
  17. ACII 2023 Foundation Model
    PEFT-SER: On the use of parameter efficient transfer learning approaches for speech emotion recognition using pre-trained speech models
    Tiantian Feng , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In 2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) , 2023
  18. Scientific Reports Wearables
    A multimodal analysis of physical activity, sleep, and work shift in nurses with wearable sensor data
    Tiantian Feng , Brandon M Booth , Brooke Baldwin-Rodrı́guez , Felipe Osorno , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    Scientific reports, 2021
  19. Mobisys Workshop Wearables
    Tiles Audio Recorder: An Unobtrusive Wearable Solution to Track Audio Activity
    Tiantian Feng , Amrutha Nadarajan , Colin Vaz , Brandon Booth , and Shrikanth Narayanan
    In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Wearable Systems and Applications , 2018
  20. ICASSP 2019 Wearables
    Discovering optimal variable-length time series motifs in large-scale wearable recordings of human bio-behavioral signals
    Tiantian Feng , and Shrikanth S Narayanan
    In ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 2019