Varun Shijo

Vuh-ROON SHI-jo

PhD Candidate - Computer Science and Engineering

Admitted to candidacy 2025-09-29

Embedded Sensing and Computing Group·Optical and Ultrasonic Imaging Lab

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Varun Shijo

Research

Neural Representations for Real-time Computational Biosensing.

Low-Cost Clinical Sensing

Computer vision and edge inference adapted to consumer-grade hardware for real-time biofeedback. UltraSpeech delivers ultrasound tongue imaging for speech therapy on CPU-only laptops. Freehand 3D ultrasound reconstruction targets self-directed breast cancer screening. Tumor detection and artifact reduction pipelines drive photoacoustic computed tomography toward translational deployment.

Multimodal Biosignal Encoding

Learned representations across time-series (EEG, IMU, speech) and imagery (ultrasound, photoacoustic) that retain interpretability and outperform rule-based baselines. Work spans MGNAT-SignalJEPA (NeurIPS 2025 EEG Foundation Challenge), photoacoustic reconstruction via Swin Transformers, and shared-tensor abstractions across sensing modalities. The target: closed-loop end-to-end systems suitable for interventional use.

Motivation

An overarching aim drives this work: maximizing throughput between humans and computers via brain-computer interfaces. Each modality (ultrasound, photoacoustics, EEG, IMUs, speech, tongue pose) contributes a slice of the bandwidth question, and the techniques (Transformers, CNNs, Mamba SSMs, multi-task pretraining) provide complementary models of thought.

Neural Representations for Real-time Computational Biosensing.

Varun Shijo's research compresses biosignal dimensionalities (1D EEG/IMU/speech, 2D/3D ultrasound and photoacoustic, and their pose/volume derivatives) into compact encodings that drive low-cost clinical sensing: reconstruction, detection, and real-time biofeedback. He builds end-to-end systems where deep learning sits inside the acquisition loop, with translational clinical outcomes treated as the primary success metric. His PhD work targets ultrasound tongue imaging for speech therapy, freehand 3D breast ultrasound, and photoacoustic artifact reduction.

Selected Projects

UltraSpeech

Real-time Ultrasound Tongue Imaging for Speech Therapy

Zero-to-one clinical biofeedback system built on a custom reactive DAG framework (sigflow-rt) that abstracts modalities by tensor shape and supports real-time inference inside the acquisition loop.

  • ›12–13 ms median latency on CPU only
  • ›19,716 clinical inference operations validated
  • ›14 tongue landmarks at 0.90 confidence
  • ›All streams synchronized via LSL for recording and playback

MGNAT-SignalJEPA

NeurIPS 2025 EEG Foundation Challenge

Self-supervised EEG representation learning with a novel spatial block masking strategy.

  • ›Ranked 55/184 valid submissions
  • ›1,202 total participants

Code

Recent Publications

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