Natarajan Balaji Shankar

Hi! I’m a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of California, Los Angeles. I’m currently affiliated with the Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory and working with Prof. Abeer Alwan.

I’m primarily interested in the usage of machine learning in speech processing. I am passionate about advancing the field of speech processing and improving the applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and large language models (LLM). Under the guidance of Dr. Abeer Alwan, I have designed and developed novel techniques for automatic scoring of child reading assessments, automatic dialect density estimation of African American English, and non-autoregressive transformer based ASR systems.

Before joining UCLA, I completed my undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. During my undergrad, I have also worked in the Signal and Image Processing Laboratory under the guidance of Prof. Varun Gopi on enhancing preprocessing techniques for color fundus images to help improve performance on downstream aberration detection and disease classification tasks.