Child vs Adult Speaker Diarization of naturalistic audio recordings in preschool environment using Deep Neural Networks
Prasanna V. Kothalkar, Jay Buzhardt, John H. L. Hansen, Dwight Irvin, Beth Rous · 2024
Buzhardt's research interests focus on developing and testing technology solutions to support data-driven intervention decision making in early childhood education.At Juniper Gardens Children's Project (JGCP), he leads the Technology Innovation Development & Research (TIDR) Lab, which is a hybrid of onsite fulltime application developers and externally contracted developers, where online and mobile applications are designed, developed, tested, and maintained for nearly all JGCP interventions that utilize technology.Through grants funded through OSEP and IES and led by Dr. Buzhardt, the TIDR Lab developed and currently maintains the MOD and IGDI platform where it is hosted.Additionally, Dr. Buzhardt has led or co-led 10 federal grants from the Department of Education (5 from Office of Special Education Programs, 5 from Institute of Education Sciences) and four from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.He currently directs a project funded by the Institute of Education Sciences to develop a web application that guides educators' data-driven intervention decision making.He also leads a $2.5M project funded by the Office of Special Education Programs to develop and test strategies and applications grounded in Implementation Science to scale-up sustained use of data-driven decision-making practices by infant-toddler service providers.He recently completed a 2nd successful RCT of the MOD across four states to test web-based decision-making support vs. self-guided decision making in Early Head Start home visiting settings.Other relevant projects include investigations of the construct and predictive validity of infant-toddler IGDI assessments, development of web-based professional development for elementary educators, and a current NSF-funded project to develop technology to automatically measure child and adult language in preschool and informal learning contexts.