Kintsugi Welcomes Rita Singh, PhD as an Advisor

Kintsugi is thrilled to welcome Rita Singh, PhD, Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Security and Privacy Institute as an advisor to the Kintsugi team. Dr. Singh’s research is focused on speech and voice recognition and forensics, using artificial intelligence to gain insight on physical, physiological, medical, psychological, sociological, behavioral and environmental parameters from the human voice. Dr. Singh is a frequent guest speaker at various conferences including the World Economic Forum, Global Security Forum, Women Leaders Global Forum, among others. Aside from her involvement with CyLab, Dr. Singh is affiliated with the National Robotics Engineering Center, the DHS Center of Excellence in Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis of George Mason University, the Robust Speech Recognition Group, and the CMU Sphinx Group.

Kintsugi’s development of machine learning-based voice biomarker infrastructure is right at the core of Dr. Singh’s research interests. We’re excited to work together on leveraging voice as a valuable biomarker in order to improve mental health equity and scale access to care.

"We’re excited to be able to leverage Dr. Singh’s world renown expertise in speech processing at CMU’s Security and Privacy institute to scale access to mental healthcare while ensuring patient privacy."

Rima Seiilova-Olson, Founder/Chief Scientist

‍

We sat down with Dr. Singh to ask a few questions:

‍

We’re thrilled to have you here! What piqued your interest in Kintsugi?

I was one of the subject matter experts who evaluated Kintsugi’s technology early on. At the time, I was asked by the potential supporters of Kintsugi to help guide its mission, if I could. I was also approached by its founders for this. When I spoke to Kintsugi’s technical team in that context, I found them to be genuinely talented, on the right track with their technology, and focused on making a positive difference to the world, more than anything else. That resonated with my mindset about how this technology must be foremost used to benefit society.  

‍

Your work in voice intelligence is fascinating. How do you think voice intelligence can be utilized as a tool for innovation?

Voice intelligence can be used to build powerful diagnostic aids that can be safely and responsibly made available to the world. Voice-based diagnostic aids can be used remotely over regular communication channels to monitor health, and make broad-level decisions about when and what type of health interventions must be sought. Ultimately, humans would still make the actual diagnoses and decisions on treatment regimens for patients, but the instantaneous availability of even broad-level guidance in health matters can often save lives.

What are you most excited to see in Kintsugi’s future?

Kintsugi is a sincere entity and its trajectory is currently set to make a positive difference in the recognition and longitudinal follow-up of mental health issues. I hope to see it succeed in its mission. The actual impact that companies such as Kintsugi will make in the lives of people may never be gauged, but I have no doubt that each such company will contribute to the happiness and well-being of a very large number of people for a very long time. I cannot wait to see that happen.

Do you have any fun facts about yourself that you would like to share?

Ha ha! All I really want to do is to write poetry, draw graphic novels, and paint. I would have become an artist and poet, but never got the chance. I am working on it now, nearly blind and past my prime. I made it to an “A” in oil painting at our College of Fine Arts. My poetry books are not selling much. Probably won’t with old-fashioned titles like “Old Fashioned Tales in Verse, or Worse.” I am working on the sequel of “Magical Moon” now, a book in verse that I wrote during Covid times.

Thank you for your time and we are excited to work with you, Dr. Singh!

Thank you! The sentiment is reciprocated.