Tawakalitu Odubiyi | Engineering | Best Researcher Award

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Dr. Tawakalitu Odubiyi | Engineering | Best Researcher Award

Research Associate at INTI International University | Malaysia

Dr. Tawakalitu Odubiyi is a Teaching and Research Associate with over six years of international experience spanning Germany, Malaysia, the UK, Finland, South Africa, and Nigeria. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from Technische Universität Berlin and a Master’s in Construction Management from the University of Johannesburg. Her expertise lies in Quantity Surveying, Civil Engineering, and the application of Digital Twin and BIM technologies in the built environment.

Profile:

Academic Background

Dr. Odubiyi holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, where her research focused on digital transformation in construction. She also earned a Master of Technology in Construction Management from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her academic background reflects a strong foundation in both technical and managerial aspects of the built environment.

Professional Experience:

Dr. Odubiyi has gained diverse research and teaching experience through various academic and industrial positions. She is currently serving as an Independent Researcher at INTI International University in Malaysia, where she conducts empirical research and leads seminars on sustainable technologies. Previously, she worked as a Research Scientist at Technische Universität Berlin, contributing to projects on business models for Cloud BIM and Digital Twin solutions. Her industry experience includes roles as a BIM Consultant at Bentley Systems in London and a BIM Researcher at Trimble Inc. in Finland, where she developed strategic digital roadmaps and conducted case studies on cost estimation and contract administration. She also served as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Johannesburg and as a Mentor and Lecturer at TU Berlin, demonstrating a strong commitment to student support and academic leadership.

Research and Publications:

Dr. Odubiyi has authored 16 scholarly articles using a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and grounded theory approaches. She has actively presented her findings at international conferences and workshops. Her research focuses on digital transformation in construction, cost management innovation, and the role of BIM in contract and project administration.

Areas of Expertise:

Her core areas of expertise include Quantity Surveying, Construction Management, BIM integration, contract administration (FIDIC, NEC), and curriculum design. She is proficient in BIM tools such as Autodesk Revit, Navisworks, CostX, and Bentley iTwin. She is also experienced in research methodology, grant writing, and academic mentoring across cross-cultural and distance learning environments.

Technical and Professional Skills:

Dr. Odubiyi is skilled in Agile methodologies and tools including Salesforce CRM, Confluence, Jira, Kanban, and BPMN. She has applied these in both academic project management and industry collaborations.

Awards and Recognition:

Dr. Odubiyi has received several prestigious awards, including the Marie Curie Horizon Fellowship from the European Union (2020), the Global Excellence Scholarship from the University of Johannesburg (2019), and the National Research Fellow Bursary (2018). In 2023, she received Community Impact Recognition from the Young Quantity Surveyors of Nigeria for her contributions to the profession.

Citation:

Cited by
All: 141
Since 2020: 132

h-index
All: 8
Since 2020: 8

i10-index
All: 7
Since 2020: 7

Publication Top Notes:

  • Using neural network model to estimate the rental price of residential properties
    2019
    21 citations

  • Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of virtual team in Nigerian construction industry
    2016
    21 citations

  • Information and communication technology application challenges in the construction industry: A narrative review
    2019
    14 citations

  • A concise review of the evolution of information and communication technologies for engineering innovations
    2021
    13 citations

  • Impact of security on rental price of residential properties: evidence from South Africa
    2019
    13 citations

  • Barriers to implementing quality management system in the Industry 4.0 era
    2019
    12 citations

  • Strategies for building information modelling adoption in the South African construction industry
    2019
    12 citations

  • Impact of Green features on rental value of residential properties: evidence from South Africa
    2024
    8 citations

  • Assessing South African construction worker’s knowledge of modern technologies for effective material management
    2021
    6 citations

  • Evaluation of the use of modern technologies for effective material management in South African construction industry
    2019
    5 citations

  • Bridging the gap between academic and practice Quantity Surveying in Nigerian construction industry
    2019
    5 citations

  • Roles and effects of utilizing recent technologies on material management for construction work in South Africa
    2019
    4 citations

  • Forecasting rental values of residential properties: a neural network model approach
    2020
    3 citations

  • A model validation and predicting the rental values of residential properties using logistic regression model
    2020
    2 citations

  • Information and Communication Technologies for construction services in South Africa: A PROCSA Scope
    2021
    1 citation

  • An Evaluation of Information and Communication Technology Application in South African Construction Industry
    2019
    1 citation

You Zhang | Engineering | Best Researcher Award

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Mr. You Zhang | Engineering | Best Researcher Award

University of Rochester, United States

Dr. You (Neil) Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester, specializing in machine learning for speech, acoustics, and audio signal processing. His research focuses on spatial audio (HRTF personalization), speech anti-spoofing, singing voice deepfake detection, and audio-visual learning. He has held research roles at Dolby, Meta, Microsoft, Tencent, and Bytedance, contributing significantly to areas like perceptual HRTF modeling and audio-visual deepfake detection.

Profile:

🎓 Education:

  • Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering (Expected 2025)
    University of Rochester

  • M.S., University of Rochester

  • B.Eng., University of Electronic Science & Technology of China

  • Exchange Program, UC Berkeley

🧠 Research Interests:

  • Spatial Audio & HRTF Personalization 🎧

  • Speech Deepfake Detection & Audio Security 🔐

  • Multimodal Learning: Audio-Visual & Emotional Speech Synthesis 🎥🗣️

🏆 Honors & Fellowships:

  • IEEE SPS Scholarship (2024)

  • NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship (2023)

  • ICASSP Rising Star in Signal Processing (2023)

  • Open Scholarship Award @ UR (2025)

🧪 Research & Industry Experience:

  • Dolby Labs 🎶 – Sr. Researcher, Multimodal Spatial Audio

  • Meta Reality Labs 🧠 – HRTF Perceptual Learning

  • Microsoft, Tencent, ByteDance, IngenID 💼 – AI R&D Internships

  • Audio Information Research Lab, UR 🎙️ – Deepfake Detection, AV Speech, HRTF Neural Fields

📚 Selected Publications:

  • IEEE T-MM, SPL, ICASSP, Interspeech, NAACL

  • Co-organizer of SVDD Challenge at SLT 2024 & MIREX 2024

  • Contributor to Handbook of Biometric Anti-spoofing (Springer)

🎤 Talks & Tutorials:

  • Invited speaker at CMU, NII Japan, ISCA SPSC

  • Tutorials @ ASA, ICME, AES (Topics: HRTF, Deepfakes, ML for Acoustics)

🎓 Teaching & Mentorship:

  • TA for Machine Learning, Audio Signal Processing, Random Processes

  • Mentored 10+ undergrad and graduate students in UR, Tsinghua, UESTC

💼 Professional Service:

  • Reviewer for IEEE TASLP, TPAMI, ICASSP, Interspeech, CVPR Workshops

  • Member: IEEE, ASA, ACM, AES

  • DEI Committee @ UR ECE | Organizer of AR/VR Events

💻 Skills:

  • Programming: Python, MATLAB, C, Java

  • Tools: Git, Linux, PyTorch, Slurm

  • Languages: English 🇺🇸, Mandarin 🇨🇳

🏃 Hobbies & More:

  • Half-Marathon Finisher 🏅

  • Loves stand-up paddleboarding, travel, badminton 🌊✈️🏸

Google Scholar Citation Metrics:

  • Citations: 751 (All time) | 751 (Since 2020)

  • h-index: 12 (All time) | 12 (Since 2020)

  • i10-index: 14 (All time) | 14 (Since 2020)

Publication Top Notes:

  1. One-class Learning Towards Synthetic Voice Spoofing Detection
    Y. Zhang, F. Jiang, Z. Duan
    IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 28, pp. 937–941, 2021.

  2. Speech Driven Talking Face Generation from a Single Image and an Emotion Condition
    S.E. Eskimez, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan
    IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 24, pp. 3480–3490, 2021.

  3. UR Channel-Robust Synthetic Speech Detection System for ASVspoof 2021
    X. Chen, Y. Zhang*, G. Zhu*, Z. Duan
    ASVspoof 2021 Workshop, 2021.

  4. SingFake: Singing Voice Deepfake Detection
    Y. Zang, Y. Zhang*, M. Heydari, Z. Duan
    IEEE ICASSP, 2024.

  5. An Empirical Study on Channel Effects for Synthetic Voice Spoofing Countermeasure Systems
    Y. Zhang, G. Zhu, F. Jiang, Z. Duan
    Interspeech, pp. 4309–4313, 2021.

  6. SAMO: Speaker Attractor Multi-Center One-Class Learning for Voice Anti-Spoofing
    S. Ding, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan
    IEEE ICASSP, 2023.

  7. A Probabilistic Fusion Framework for Spoofing Aware Speaker Verification
    Y. Zhang, G. Zhu, Z. Duan
    Odyssey: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop, pp. 77–84, 2022.

  8. Global HRTF Personalization Using Anthropometric Measures
    Y. Wang, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan, M. Bocko
    Audio Engineering Society (AES) 150th Convention, 2021.

  9. Rethinking Audio-Visual Synchronization for Active Speaker Detection
    A. Wuerkaixi, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan, C. Zhang
    IEEE MLSP, 2022.

  10. CtrSVDD: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline Analysis for Controlled Singing Voice Deepfake Detection
    Y. Zang, J. Shi, Y. Zhang, et al.
    Interspeech, pp. 4783–4787, 2024.

  11. VERSA: A Versatile Evaluation Toolkit for Speech, Audio, and Music
    J. Shi, H. Shim, J. Tian, Y. Zhang, et al.
    NAACL (Demo Track), 2025.

  12. HRTF Field: Unifying Measured HRTF Magnitude Representation with Neural Fields
    Y. Zhang, Y. Wang, Z. Duan
    IEEE ICASSP, 2023.

  13. SVDD 2024: The Inaugural Singing Voice Deepfake Detection Challenge
    Y. Zhang, Y. Zang, J. Shi, R. Yamamoto, T. Toda, Z. Duan
    IEEE SLT, pp. 782–787, 2024.

  14. DyViSE: Dynamic Vision-Guided Speaker Embedding for Audio-Visual Speaker Diarization
    A. Wuerkaixi, K. Yan, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan, C. Zhang
    IEEE MMSP, 2022.

  15. Predicting Global Head-Related Transfer Functions from Scanned Head Geometry Using Deep Learning and Compact Representations
    Y. Wang, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan, M. Bocko
    arXiv preprint, arXiv:2207.14352, 2022.

  16. Learning Arousal-Valence Representation from Categorical Emotion Labels of Speech
    E. Zhou, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan
    IEEE ICASSP, 2024.

  17. SVDD Challenge 2024: A Singing Voice Deepfake Detection Challenge Evaluation Plan
    Y. Zhang, Y. Zang, J. Shi, et al.
    arXiv preprint, arXiv:2405.05244, 2024.

  18. ASVspoof 5: Design, Collection and Validation of Resources for Spoofing, Deepfake, and Adversarial Attack Detection Using Crowdsourced Speech
    X. Wang, H. Delgado, Y. Zhang, et al.
    Computer Speech & Language, 2025.

  19. Emotional Dimension Control in Language Model-Based Text-to-Speech: Spanning a Broad Spectrum of Human Emotions
    K. Zhou, Y. Zhang, S. Zhao, et al.
    arXiv preprint, arXiv:2409.16681, 2024.

  20. Mitigating Cross-Database Differences for Learning Unified HRTF Representation
    Y. Wen, Y. Zhang, Z. Duan
    IEEE WASPAA, 2023.