About Me

Hello! This is Orchid Chetia Phukan. I am a (final-year) Ph.D. Scholar at IIIT-Delhi, India. My research interests include Speech and Audio Processing. Currently, I am interested in the adaptation of speech and audio foundation models for behavioral (e.g., speech emotion recognition) and forensic applications (e.g., audio deepfake detection).

I am looking for Postdoc opportunities for Spring 2026. I am looking for positions in speech and audio processing. Specifically, audio deepfake detection/anti-spoofing/audio-visual deepfake detection, speech/multimodal emotion recognition/affective computing, and speech + health. I am also open to related topics other than those mentioned above within speech and audio processing. If you have such opportunities, please reach out to me at orchidp@iiitd.ac.in.

I am always open to collaborations within my research interests. Do ping me at orchidp@iiitd.ac.in

Selected Publications (aka First-authored Papers)

Conference (* equal contribution)

-> Transforming the Embeddings: A Lightweight Technique for Speech Emotion Recognition Tasks, INTERSPEECH 2023, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

-> Heterogeneity over Homogeneity: Investigating Multilingual Speech Pre-Trained Models for Detecting Audio Deepfake, NAACL (Findings) 2024, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan∗, Gautam Kashyap∗, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

-> SONIC: Synergizing VisiON Foundation Models for Stress RecogNItion from ECG signals, EUSIPCO 2024 (Oral), Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan∗, Ankita Das∗, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

-> Are Paralinguistic Representations all that is needed for Speech Emotion Recognition? , INTERSPEECH 2024, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan, Gautam Kashyap, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

-> Towards Multilingual Audio-Visual Question Answering , INTERSPEECH 2024, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan∗, Priyabrata Mallick∗, Swarup Ranjan Behera∗, Aalekhya Satya Narayani, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma

-> Whispers of Trauma: Leveraging Social Media for Assessing Mental Health in Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse , ASONAM 2024, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan, Rajesh Sharma, Arun Balaji Buduru

-> Strong Alone, Stronger Together: Synergizing Modality-Binding Foundation Models with Optimal Transport for Non-Verbal Emotion Recognition , ICASSP 2025, Authors: Orchid Chetia Phukan, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar∗, Girish∗, Swarup Ranjan Behera, Sishir Kalita, Arun Balaji Buduru, Rajesh Sharma, S.R Mahadeva Prasanna

Talks, Honors and Achievements

-> Presented a session at FDP- Anil Neerukonda Institute of technology and sciences, Visakhapatnam, India on the topic of Foundations and Applications of AI in Healthcare with a specific focus on stress recognition through wearable sensors with the application of TinyML (Jan’23).

Awarded Grants

-> ISCA grant for registration and travel to INTERSPEECH 24
-> EURASIP grant for registration and travel to EUSIPCO 24

Experience

-> Research Intern at AI Institute at University of South Carolina (Dec’21 - June’22)

Teaching

-> Teaching Assistant (TA) at Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia for Business Data Analytics Course (Spring 2023, Spring 2022)

Professional Services

-> PC Member for ASONAM 2023
-> PC Member for ASONAM 2024
-> Reviewer for COLING 2025
-> Reviewer for ICME 2025
-> Reviewer for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence Journal

Volunteering

-> Volunteered at The Knowledge Graph Conference (KGC) 2021

Supervision and Mentorship

Supervision

-> Reena Vaziri (Supervised for Master’s Thesis, University of Tartu, Estonia, Dec’22 - Jun’23)

Mentorship

-> Ankit Sharma (IIT Ropar, India, March’23 - May’23)
-> Shubham Singh (BIT Mesra, India, May’23- July’24)
-> Ankita Das (IIIT Guwahati, India, June’23 - March’24)
-> Devyani Koshal (IIIT Delhi, India, August’23 - June’24)
-> Panchal Nayak (VIT Vellore, India, September’23 - Oct’23)