Chitralekha Gupta

Chitralekha Gupta is a visiting postdoctoral researcher (one-year appointment) at the MIT Media Lab and a Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Augmented Human Lab. Her research explores human-centered audio AI: intelligent systems that understand speech and sound in their visual, environmental, and behavioral contexts to support learning, judgment, accessibility, and everyday action. She is particularly interested in designing AI assistance for cognitive support while preserving people’s critical thinking, and agency.

Her work spans speech and audio machine learning, multimodal sensing, wearable systems, and human–computer interaction. Her current projects investigate wearable interventions for critical engagement with spoken information, voice agents that adapt their level of assistance to users’ needs, and accessible technologies for people with visual or communication disabilities. This work has involved collaborations with MIT Media Lab, Meta Reality Labs, CNRS in France, AIST in Japan, Singapore’s Ministry of Defence, and Alexandra Hospital in Singapore.

Chitralekha has led and contributed to interdisciplinary research supported by grants in Singapore and internationally. Her work has appeared in venues across HCI, speech and audio processing, and virtual reality, including an IEEE VR Best Paper. She also co-founded MuSigPro, a music-technology startup whose singing analysis platform served more than 35,000 users and led to a U.S. patent.

She also contributes to the research community as a reviewer for venues including CHI, UIST, NeurIPS, and ICASSP, and as a meta-reviewer for Interspeech 2026. She has served on the organizing committees of ICASSP 2022, ISMIR 2022, and ASRU 2019.

Find out more on her webpage: https://chitralekha.info