Research Statement

My broad research interests involve the intersection of machine learning and accessibility. More specifically, facial expressions are a core part of American Sign Language (ASL), but facial expression recognition technologies for ASL are very immature. I am interested in developing diverse and inclusive datasets to ensure that these technologies empower the Deaf community rather than discriminate against them.

Patents

Method and apparatus to accurately interpret facial expressions in American Sign Language
Irene Rogan Shaffer
US Patent No. 10679042, issued June 2020.

Publications

PerfGuard: Deploying ML-for-Systems without Performance Regressions
H M Sajjad Hossain, Lucas Rosenblatt, Gilbert Antonius, Irene Shaffer, Remmelt Ammerlaan, Abhishek Roy, Markus Weimer, Hiren Patel, Marc Friedman, Shi Qiao, Peter Orenberg, Soundarajan Srinivasan, Vijay Ramani, Alekh Jindal
MLOps Systems 2020, Austin, USA.

Exploring the Performance of Facial Expression Recognition Technologies on Deaf Adults October 2018 and Their Children
Irene Rogan Shaffer
ASSETS ‘18 Student Research Competition (paper and poster) Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, October 2018, Pages 474–476.

See my Google Scholar page for a complete list.