Mary Pietrowicz

Biography

Mary Pietrowicz is a Senior Research Scientist at the Illinois Applied Research Institute. She specializes in computational health, wellness, and creativity. Her research focuses on determining health and wellness states by analyzing how a person speaks, moves, writes, creates, interacts with others, and on creating usable, deployable systems and tools which can do this at scale. Her recent work explores speech and/or language models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), depression/anxiety, schizophrenia, Huntington's Disease, and other conditions. This approach uses signals such as voice and movement which can be collected from now-ubiquitous cameras and microphones, for which end-user solutions can be deployed on phones, tablets, watches, and mobile desktop devices. This could potentially extend the capacity of medicine/telemedicine, reach people without sufficient access to health care, and revolutionize current medical practice. Mary also explores speech, language, movement, and creativity to discover how elements of human expression function and work together with the goal of leveraging models of human expression in the automated assessment of health and wellness.

Before earning her PH.D., Mary worked as a software engineer in both academia and industry in a variety of application spaces and projects. Some of these projects include interactive multimodal art, multiple indoor location tracking systems, tangible interfaces for teaching nutrition to children, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration systems, and smart environment systems. Mary earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science here at the University of Illinois, a Master of Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Research Interests

• Computational Medicine
• Environments and Systems for Automated Health Assessment and Treatment
• Machine Modeling of Disease States via Embodied and Creative Signals
• Machine Models of Human Expression, Behavior, and Creative Processes and Artifacts
• Cultural Computing and Interactive Art
• Machine Listening

Chapters in Books

• "Special Edition, Using Java," First Edition, Que Publishing, 1996.

Selected Articles in Journals

• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios. “Acoustic correlates for perceived effort levels in male and female acted voices,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA), 2017.

Articles in Conference Proceedings

• Mary Pietrowicz, Carla Agurto, Raquel Norel, Elif Eyigoz, Guillermo Cecchi, Zarina R. Bilgrami, and Cheryl Corcoran, “A New Approach for Automating Analysis of Responses on Verbal Fluency Tests from Subjects At-Risk for Schizophrenia,” INTERSPEECH 2019.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Carla Agurto, Jonah Casebeer, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Karrie Karahalios, and Guillermo Cecchi, “Dimensional Analysis of Laughter in Female Conversational Speech,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2019.
• Carla Agurto, Raquel Norel, Mary Pietrowicz, Muhammad Parvaz, Sivan Kinreich, Keren Bachi, Guillermo Cecchi, and Rita Z. Goldstein, “Speech Markers for Clinical Assessment of Cocaine Users,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2019.
• Carla Paola Agurto Rios, Mary Pietrowicz, Elif Eyigoz, Elizabeth Mosmiller, Emily Baxi, Jeffery D. Rothstein, Promit Roy, James Berry, Nicholas Maragakis, Omar Ahmad, Guillermo Cecchi, and Raquel Norel, “Analyzing Progression of Motor and Speech Impairment in ALS,” 41st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) 2019.
• Raquel Norel, Mary Pietrowicz, Carla Agurto, Shay Rishoni, and Guillermo Cecchi, “Detection of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) via Acoustic Analysis,” INTERSPEECH 2018.
• Jonah Casebeer, Hillol Sarker, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Nicholas Fay, Mary Pietrowicz, and Amar Das. “Verbal Protest Recognition in Children with Autism,” International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2018.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios. “Discovering Dimensions of Perceived Vocal Expression in Semi-structured, Unscripted Oral History Accounts,” International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2017.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios. “Acoustic Correlates for Perceived Effort Levels in Expressive Speech,” INTERSPEECH 2015.
• Mary Pietrowicz and Karrie Karahalios. “Visualizing Vocal Expression,” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstract (CHIEA) 2014.
• Mary Pietrowicz and Karrie Karahalios, “Sonic Shapes: Visualizing Vocal Expression,” International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) 2013.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Danish Chopra, Amin Sadeghi, Puneet Chandra, Brian Bailey, and Karrie Karahalios. “CrowdBand: An Automated Crowdsourcing Sound Composition System,” Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) 2013.
• Mary Pietrowicz and Karrie Karahalios. “Phonetic Shapes: An Interactive, Sonic Guest Book,” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstract (CHIEA) 2012.
• Guy Garnett, Robert E. McGrath, and Mary Pietrowicz. “mWorlds: novel human interaction with virtual worlds,” Mardi Gras 2009: Virtual Worlds: New Realms

Other Publications

• Mary Pietrowicz, Carla Agurto, Jonah Casebeer, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Karrie Karahalios, and Guillermo Cecchi, “Modeling Expressive Laughter in Conversational Speech,” presented at the Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS) at Harvard Medical School, 2019.
• Cansu Sarac, Carla Agurto, Raquel Norel, Elif Eyigoz, Guillermo Cecchi, Zarina R. Bilgrami, Cheryl Corcoran, and Mary Pietrowicz, “A New Approach for Automating Analysis of Responses on Verbal Fluency Tests from Subjects At-Risk for Schizophrenia,” presented at the Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS) at Harvard Medical School, 2019.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Carla Agurto, and Guillermo Cecchi, “Analysis of ICU Patient Interviews,” presented to collaborators at Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre, 2018.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios, “Discovering Dimensions of Perceived Vocal Expression in Semi-Structured, Unscripted Oral History Accounts,” Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2017.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios,” Acoustic Correlates for Perceived Effort Levels in Male Scripted Speech,” Midwest Speech and Language Days & Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium (MSLD & MCLC) 2016.
• Mary Pietrowicz, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, and Karrie Karahalios, “Acoustic Correlates for Percived Effort Levels in Expressive Speech,” Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) 2015.
• Air Tropes A sonification of soybean growth data, which emphasized differences between CO2 enhanced and Ozone-enhanced environments for plant growth. Part of the “Sounds of Science” collaboration between artists and scientists at the University of Illinois, at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, September, 2014.
• Mary Pietrowicz and Karrie Karahalios. “Visualizing Vocal Expression,” for NSF Expeditions project: “Collaborative Research: Computational Behavioral Science: Modeling, Analysis, and Visualization of Social and Communicative Behavior,” 2013.
• Dark Star Interactive piece for dancer, percussion, motion sensors, electronics, and electronic lighting, at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, April, 2011. Available at: https://vimeo.com/63711846
• Kinetic Flame Interactive piece for dancer, percussion, motion sensors, electronics, and video, at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, April, 2011. Available at: https://vimeo.com/23083695
• Voltage Composed piece for flute, piano, and electronics, at Smith Hall, University of Illinois, July, 2010.
• Remembering Composed piece for 4 voices and chamber orchestra, based on WWII oral history texts, at Smith Hall, University of Illinois, October 2010.
• Edream and Be Merry Interactive, improvised, distributed performance for violin, flute, percussion, and distributed virtual worlds display. Developed portions of the interactive software, and performed the flute part. At the HASTAC Blue Lights in the Basement event, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, April, 2009. Available at: https://vimeo.com/198106703
• John Toenjes, Thecla Schiphorst, and Mary Pietrowicz, Interactive Workshop on Laban Movement, 2009 (accelerometer-based, interactive motion analysis demonstration and presentation).
• Mary Pietrowicz and Polly Baker, “Location Aware Multimedia Delivery in an Art Museum,” I-Light Symposium Presentation, Indianapolis, IN, 2005.
• Robert Comer, Verlyn Wilson, and Mary Pietrowicz, “Make-A-Meal Interface for Nutrition Education,” National Association of Health Education Centers, Philadelphia, PA, 2003 (demonstration and presentation).

Patents

• Brice Klein, Alessia Serafino, Yashaswini Madhavan, Jerry Shim, Norman Lee, Murtaza Heider, Lindsay Hai, Mary Pietrowicz, and Xiaoyue Chen, “Methods and apparatus for securing a sensor to a monitored device,” W.W. Grainger, Inc., US20170018165A1, Priority date 2015-07-13, Publication date 2017-01-19.
• Geoffry A. Westphal and Mary Pietrowicz, “System and method for using geographical locations to provide access to product information,” W.W. Grainger, Inc., US20170055112A1, Priority date 2015-08-17, Publication date 2017-02-23.
• Avner Abrami and Mary Pietrowicz, “Speech Characterization Using a Synthesized, Reference Audio Signal,” IBM, Inc. Application: 16/553997, filed on August 28, 2019.