Hi, I'm Suhas!

I'm an Applied Scientist at Amazon, based in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in Informatics and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at Penn State, advised by Dr. Saeed Abdullah, where I built AI tools for mental health therapy, including synthetic therapy conversations and empathetic small language models for PTSD treatment.

My work sits at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and human wellbeing, from using speech signals to detect neurological conditions and building privacy-preserving depression assessment tools to creating sensor networks to prevent train derailments in India.

Curriculum Vitae · Google Scholar · LinkedIn · GitHub · Twitter · hi@bnsuhas.com

Suhas
Penn State University Amazon AWS Samsung Research America 3M Health Information Systems Indian Institute of Science PES University

Recent News

Jan 2026 One paper accepted at ICASSP 2026.
Dec 2025 Selected as an Amazon Fellow 2026.
Aug 2025 Thousand Voices of Trauma accepted at NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight), and two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025 (one Oral, one Findings).
Jun 2025 Defended my Ph.D. at Penn State and joined Amazon as an Applied Scientist.
Apr 2025 Won Best Poster Award at MASC-SLL (1st of 60+ posters) and 3rd Place at PSU AI Week (featured in Penn State News).
Mar 2025 U.S. Patent application published for cuff-less blood pressure monitoring (US 2025/0090033 A1).
Earlier news (2022 to 2024)
Oct 2024 Awarded the College of IST Graduate Student Travel Grant ($1,000) and served as a Judge for the 3 Minute Thesis Competition at Penn State.
Sep 2024 Featured on the ISCA-SAC Interspeech Podcast discussing my research.
Aug 2024 Interned at Amazon AWS Health AI as an Applied Scientist Intern (Aug to Nov 2024).
Jun 2024 Our work on LLMs for exercise motivation was accepted at INTERSPEECH 2024.
Apr 2024 Recognized by President Bendapudi for the NSF fellowship and served as a Judge for the 2024 Undergraduate Exhibition.
Jan 2024 Program Committee Member for IEEE ICHI 2024 and Reviewer for ACM CHI.
Dec 2023 Our work on cuff-less BP monitoring was accepted at ICASSP 2024.
Nov 2023 Passed my Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam (Thesis Proposal).
May 2023 Paper on Differential Privacy accepted at INTERSPEECH 2023, and started my summer internship at Samsung Research America (May to Aug 2023).
Feb 2023 Started reviewing for IEEE Signal Processing Letters and ACM CUI.
Sep 2022 Selected for Google CS Research Mentorship Program (2022b Cohort).
Jul 2022 Selected for Google Developers Machine Learning Bootcamp 2022.
Jun 2022 Awarded the NSF NRT LINDIV Graduate Fellowship (2022 to 2023) and passed my Qualifying Exam.

Research & Publications

Click any paper title to view the publication. Full list on Google Scholar.

Preprints & Under Review

ICASSP 2027 Submitted
Unsupervised cross-device speaker diarization and linking through spatiotemporal structure
Suhas BN and N. Kudupu.
npj Digital Medicine Under Review
AI Safety Training Can Be Clinically Harmful
Suhas BN, et al.

Conference Papers & Book Chapter

ICASSP 2026
Fine-Tuning Large Audio-Language Models with LoRA for Precise Temporal Localization of Prolonged Exposure Therapy Elements
Suhas BN, J. Alaparthi, S. Abdullah, D. Mattioli, R. Arriaga, C. Wiese, and A. Sherrill.
NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight
Thousand Voices of Trauma: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Modeling Prolonged Exposure Therapy Conversations
Suhas BN, A. Sherrill, R. Arriaga, C. Wiese, and S. Abdullah.
EMNLP 2025 Main (Oral)
The Pursuit of Empathy: Evaluating Small Language Models for PTSD Dialogue Support
Suhas BN, Y. Mahajan, S. Abdullah, D. Mattioli, R. Arriaga, C. Wiese, and A. Sherrill.
EMNLP 2025 Findings
How Real Are Synthetic Therapy Conversations? Evaluating Fidelity in Prolonged Exposure Dialogues
Suhas BN, S. Abdullah, D. Mattioli, R. Arriaga, C. Wiese, and A. Sherrill.
INTERSPEECH 2025
Fact-Controlled Diagnosis of Hallucinations in Medical Text Summarization
Suhas BN, JP. Cohen, HC. Shing, JC. Moriarty, L. Xu, M. Strong, J. Burnsky, J. Ofor, J.R. Mason, S. Chen, C. Shivade, and S. Srinivasan.
INTERSPEECH 2024
Speaking of Health: Leveraging Large Language Models to assess Exercise Motivation and Behavior of Rehabilitation Patients
Suhas BN, A. Rebar, and S. Abdullah.
ICASSP 2024
End-to-End Personalized Cuff-less Blood Pressure Monitoring using ECG and PPG Signals
Suhas BN, R.S. Srinivasa, Y.M. Saidutta, J. Cho, C.H. Lee, C. Yang, Y. Shen, and H. Jin.
INTERSPEECH 2023
Privacy-Preserving Dementia Classification with Differential Privacy: An Exploration of the Privacy-Accuracy Tradeoff in Speech Signal Data
Suhas BN, S. Rajtmajer, and S. Abdullah.
Springer 2023 Book Chapter
Automatic classification of dementia using text and speech data
HJ. Han, Suhas BN, L. Qiu, and S. Abdullah. In Multimodal AI in Healthcare, pp. 399-407.
ICASSP 2022
Privacy Sensitive Speech Analysis using Federated Learning to assess Depression
Suhas BN and S. Abdullah.
CogMI 2020
Automatic bird sound detection in long range field recordings using Wavelets & Mel filter bank features [Code]
Suhas BN.
SPCOM 2020
Speech task-based automatic classification of ALS and Parkinson's Disease and their severity using log Mel spectrograms [Code]
Suhas BN, J. Mallela, A. Illa, B. K. Yamini, N. Atchayaram, R. Yadav, D. Gope, and PK Ghosh.
ICASSP 2020
Voice-based classification of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Parkinson's Disease and Healthy Controls with CNN-LSTM using transfer learning
J. Mallela, A. Illa, Suhas BN, S. Udupa, Y. Belur, N. Atchayaram, R. Yadav, P. Reddy, D. Gope, and PK Ghosh.
INTERSPEECH 2019
Comparison of Speech Tasks and Recording Devices for Voice-Based Automatic Classification of Healthy Subjects and Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Suhas BN, D. Patel, NR Koluguri, Y. Belur, P. Reddy, A. Nalini, R. Yadav, D. Gope, and PK Ghosh.
IC4 2018
Wireless Sensor Networks Based Monitoring of Railway Tracks
Suhas BN, S. Bhagavat, V. Vimalanand, and P. Suresh. (Highlighted by the Minister for Railways, Govt. of India)

Patents

US Patent Published 2025
Method for end-to-end cuff-less blood pressure monitoring using ECG and PPG signals
Suhas BN, Y. M. Saidutta, R. S. Srinivasa, J. Cho, C.H. Lee, C. Yang, Y. Shen, and H. Jin. U.S. Patent Application 18/883,902 (US 2025/0090033 A1).

Talks & Presentations

For speaking opportunities or collaboration discussions, feel free to reach out.

Jun 2025 Ph.D. Defense
Generative, Human-centered AI In Mental Health: Supporting Therapeutic Fidelity And Empathy In Interactions [Slides · Thesis]
College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University
Apr 2021 M.S. Defense
Privacy-preserving assessment of depression using Speech signal processing [Slides · Thesis]
School of EECS, Penn State University
Dec 2020 Seminar
Neural interfacing and mapping using electrochemical sensors
School of EECS, Penn State University
Dec 2019 Seminar
MIMO in 5G Wireless Systems
School of EECS, Penn State University
Aug 2019 Seminar
Performance characterization of Sound Recorders
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
Nov 2018 Seminar
Introduction to Music Information Retrieval, Audio licensing & Blockchains
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

Beyond the Lab

  • Music: Playing the mridangam (a South Indian percussion instrument), which I’ve practiced since age 8, including a performance aired on DD Chandana (Doordarshan) in 2006.
  • Sports & Speedcubing: Playing cricket, watching football (Chelsea FC supporter), and solving Rubik’s cubes.
  • Co-authorship Distances: Dijkstra number of 5, Erdős number of 5, and distance of 3 to Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun (4 to Geoff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio).
Mridangam performance (2006) & Spotify playlist