Xiutian (Theo) Zhao

A Learner in Speech and Language Processing.

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Me in London ©Y. Deng

I’m a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and Data Science and AI Institute (DSAI). I’m fortunate to be advised by Dr. Berrak Sisman in the SMILE Lab.

My research focuses on language and speech processing, especially expressiveness in audio-language models, multimodal modeling, and interpretability. During my master’s dissertation at the University of Edinburgh, I worked with Dr. Ivan Titov, Dr. Rochelle Choenni, and Dr. Rohit Saxena.

Outside research, I’m a cinephile (2,000+ films and counting) and enjoy landsacpe photography, swimming, stargazing, and reading ancient history.

news

Jan 9, 2026 1 paper is accepted to EACL 2026! And I will volunteer for the conferecne, see you there! :morocco:
Oct 29, 2025 I graduated from the University of Edinburgh :scotland: An adaptation of my master’s disseratation there is now on arXiv! Many thanks to Dr. Rochelle Choenni, Dr. Rohit Saxena, and Dr. Ivan Titov.
May 24, 2025 I will start my PhD journey at the Johns Hopkins University in Fall 2025! Super exicted to join Dr. Berrak Sisman’s group! :tada:
Sep 20, 2024 2 papers are accepted to EMNLP 2024 Main Conference, and 1 paper to Findings! :us:
Jul 2, 2024 1 paper is accepted to Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Language Models @ ACL 2024! :thailand:

selected publications