I am a Post-doctoral Research Scientist at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and also currently serving as the Technology Director for the Laboratory of Intelligent Global Health and Humanitarian Response Technologies (LiGHT), which is jointly based at EPFL and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health via Ariadne Labs. I am also an Archer-Cornfield Fellow at Ashesi University.
In my role at LiGHT, I contribute to research that is focused on building equitable, reliable AI for high-stakes health decisions, especially in low-resource settings, by combining clinical expertise, rigorous evaluation, and diverse datasets to reduce bias.
I completed my PhD in the NLPnorth research unit within the Computer Science Department at the IT University of Copenhagen advised by Dr. Natalie Schluter. During my Ph.D., I was a Ph.D. Student Researcher at Apple in the Machine Learning Research organisation and also worked as a Visiting Researcher at Columbia University in the Spoken Language Processing Group.
I received my B.S. summa cum laude in Computer Science from Ashesi University and my M.S. in Computer Science from the IT University of Copenhagen.
OTHER INTERESTS OUTSIDE OF RESEARCH:
Outside of research I love to read books and practice martial arts(Shotokan karate and Brazilian jiu-jitsu).
Akan Cinematic Emotions (ACE): A Multimodal Multi-party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Movie Dialogues
David Sasu*, Zehui Wu, Ziwei Gong, Run Chen, Pengyuan Shi, Lin Ai, Julia Hirschberg, Natalie Schluter
In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)
Prosody Detection Improves Pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition
David Sasu*, Natalie Schluter
In the Proceedings of Interspeech (INTERSPEECH 2025)
Enhancing Speech Instruction Understanding and Disambiguation in Robotics via Speech Prosody
David Sasu*, Kweku Yamoah, Benedict Quartey, Natalie Schluter, George Konadaris
In the Proceedings of Interspeech (INTERSPEECH 2025)
Learning More with Less: Self-Supervised Approaches for Low-Resource Speech Emotion Recognition
Ziwei Gong, Pengyuan Shi, Kaan Donbekci, Lin Ai, Run Chen, David Sasu, Zehui Wu, Julia Hirschberg
In the Proceedings of Interspeech (INTERSPEECH 2025)
Does Context Matter? A Prosodic Comparison of English and Spanish in Monolingual and Multilingual Discourse Settings
Debasmita Bhattacharya*, David Sasu*, Michela Marchini, Natalie Schluter, Julia Hirschberg
In Proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025)
M.Sc thesis: Multi-lingual and Cross-lingual Automatic Prosodic Annotation
Grade: 12/12 (Highest Possible Grade)
B.Sc thesis: A Functional NLP Speech System For Akan Using Limited Data
Grade: A+ (Highest Possible Grade)
Student Excellence Award - Ashesi University
The award is presented to a student who exemplifies academic excellence, creates major impact in uplifting the image of Ashesi by example and contributes immensely towards supporting fellow students.Innovation Award - Ashesi University
The award is presented to a student who uses his knowledge in technology to improve the lives of others and create a major societal impact.Presidential Award for Scholarship, Leadership & Citizenship - Ashesi University
This is the highest award a student can receive at Ashesi. It is awarded and presented each year by the President of the University to a student who has contributed in outstanding ways to Ashesi’s mission.Nominated for Best Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award - Ashesi University
This award is presented to a teaching assistant that demonstrates unusual dedication to teaching and consistently goes above and beyond the call of duty.Chairman's Award - International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition
The award is the highest award given at the IGEM competition. It is presented to recognize “integrity, good sportsmanship, respect, honesty, celebration, co-operation, effort and excellence”.Silver Medal Award - International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition
This is a merit award given to reflect the stellar performance demonstrated at the IGEM competition.Millennium Fellowship - United Nations
The Millennium Fellowship is a prestigious fellowship that provides fellows with world class training, connections and recognition to boost their social impact efforts.African Future Leader Fellowship - African Change Makers
The African Future Leader Fellowship is a prestigious fellowship that equips young and gifted Africans to become future African leaders.Archer-Cornfield Fellowship - Ashesi University
The Archer-Cornfield Fellowship is a prestigious fellowship that engages early-career scholars and seasoned faculty to spend a semester or a year teaching and mentoring at Ashesi University.From Strength To Strength by Arthur C. Brooks
Favourite choice: Livewired by David Eagleman
Favourite choice: Man's search for meaning by Victor Frankl
Favourite choice: Becoming by Michelle Obama