Mandy Korpusik Department of Computer Science Loyola Marymount University office: Doolan Hall 201B email: mandy.korpusik@lmu.edu

News

We recently completed a $256,000 NSF SBIR Phase I grant, and my interdisciplinary LMU research team was recently awarded a $50,000 seed grant to build an intuitive eating diet tracking application that provides personalized food recommendations.

About me

I graduated with my PhD from MIT in 2019 and am now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University, where I am going up for tenure this year! My primary research interest is natural language processing and AI, especially applications of deep learning. In the nutrition space, I have used Transformer models to perform semantic tagging and mapping of natural language meal and exercise descriptions to semantically similar database entries. I also demonstrated that asking followup clarification questions with deep reinforcement learning boosts food recall by narrowing down the search space, and that multi-modal Transformers with language and vision inputs outperform models using only one modality.

Resume/CV

Here's my CV. [pdf]

Publications

• Food for Thought: Third place winners - Binary classification with pre-trained BERT
  Yifan Hu, Mandy Korpusik
  Real World Data Science, August 21, 2023.
• Multi-modal Food Classification in a Diet Tracking System with Spoken and Visual Inputs
  Shivani Gowda*, Yifan (Rosetta) Hu*, Mandy Korpusik (*authors contributed equally)
  2023 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2023), June 2023.
• Impact of Late Policies on Submission Behavior and Grades in Computer Programming
  Mandy Korpusik, Jordan Freitas, John David Dionisio
  American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Computing & Information Technology Division, June 2022.
• Pacman Trainer: Classroom-Ready Deep Learning from Data to Deployment
  Masao Kitamura, Mandy Korpusik, Andrew Forney
  American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Computing & Information Technology Division, June 2022.
• Use of Natural Spoken Language With Automated Mapping of Self-reported Food Intake to Food Composition Data for Low-burden Real-time Dietary Assessment: Method Comparison Study
  Salima Taylor*, Mandy Korpusik*, Sai Das, Cheryl Gilhooly, Ryan Simpson, James Glass, Susan Roberts (*authors contributed equally)
  Journal of Medical Internet Research, December 2021.
• A New Dataset for Natural Language Understanding of Exercise Logs in a Food and Fitness Spoken Dialogue System
  Maya Epps, Juan Uribe, Mandy Korpusik
  Spoken Language Technology, January 2021.
• A Comparison of Deep Learning Methods for Language Understanding
  Mandy Korpusik, Zoe Liu, James Glass
  Interspeech, September 2019.
• Deep Learning for Database Mapping and Asking Clarification Questions in Dialogue Systems
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, August 2019.
• Deep Learning for Spoken Dialogue Systems: Application to Nutrition
  Mandy Korpusik
  Ph.D. Thesis, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2019.
• A Food Logging System for iOS with Natural Spoken Language Meal Descriptions [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, Salima F. Taylor, Sai Das, Cheryl Gilhooly, Susan B. Roberts, James Glass
  Annual Nutrition Science Meeting, June 2019.
• Testing the Validity of a Natural Spoken Language Application for the Self-monitoring of Daily Dietary Intake [poster]
  Rachel E. Silver, Mandy Korpusik, Salima F. Taylor, Sai Krupa Das, Cheryl H. Gilhooly, James Glass, Susan B. Roberts
  Annual Nutrition Science Meeting, June 2019.
• Dialogue State Tracking with Convolutional Semantic Taggers [slides]
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  The 44th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May 2019.
• Convolutional Neural Encoder for the 7th Dialogue System Technology Challenge [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  7th Dialogue System Technology Challenge (DSTC7) Workshop, January 2019.
• Convolutional Neural Networks for Dialogue State Tracking without Pre-trained Word Vectors or Semantic Dictionaries [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), December 2018.
• Convolutional Neural Networks and Multitask Strategies for Semantic Mapping of Natural Language Input to a Structured Database [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  The 43rd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2018.
• Spoken Language Understanding for a Nutrition Dialogue System
  Mandy Korpusik, James Glass
  IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, June 2017.
• Character-based Embedding Models and Reranking Strategies for Understanding Natural Language Meal Descriptions [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, Zachary Collins, James Glass
  Interspeech, August 2017.
• Semantic Mapping of Natural Language Input to Database Entries via Convolutional Neural Networks [slides]
  Mandy Korpusik, Zachary Collins, James Glass
  The 42nd IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), March 2017.
• Recurrent Neural Networks for Customer Purchase Prediction on Twitter [slides]
  Mandy Korpusik, Shigeyuki Sakaki, Francine Chen, Yan-Ying Chen
  Content-based Recommender Systems Workshop (CBRecSys), September 2016.
• Corpus for Customer Purchase Behavior Prediction in Social Media
  Shigeyuki Sakaki, Francine Chen, Mandy Korpusik, Yan-Ying Chen
  Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), May 2016.
• Distributional Semantics for Understanding Spoken Meal Descriptions [poster]
  Mandy Korpusik, Calvin Huang, Michael Price, James Glass
  41st IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), March 2016.
• Spoken Language Understanding in a Nutrition Dialogue System
  Mandy Korpusik
  S.M. Thesis, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2015.
• Data Collection and Language Understanding of Food Descriptions [poster]
  Mandy korpusik, Nicole Schmidt, Jennifer Drexler, Scott Cyphers, James Glass
  Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), December 2014.
• Nutrition System Demonstration
  Mandy korpusik, Rachael Naphtal, Nicole Schmidt, Scott Cyphers, James Glass
  Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 2014.

Talks

• Tech Talk
  eBay, June 2022
• Keynote
  NAACL workshop on trustworthy NLP, Mexico City, June 2021
• iSTEM Lightning Talk on Machine Learning
  LMU, Los Angeles, February 2021
• Colloquium
  Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, February 2020
• Invited Talk
  Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, October 2018
• PhD Panel
  Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop, KTH, Sweden, August 2017
• Research Pitch [slides]
  Machine Intelligence Summit, Pillar & MIT, November 2016
• Using computers to eat healthier [slides]
  CSAIL Research Party, MIT, November 2016
• NutriBuddy: Counting Calories with Speech [slides]
  CSAIL Advisory Board Meeting, MIT, May 2016
• Natural Language Processing Research [slides]
  Women in Technology Program (WTP), MIT, July 2014

Awards

• Spring 2024, Faculty Fellow, LMU Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
• 2023, Faculty Fellow, LMU Center for Teaching Exccellence.
• April 2022, Ascending Scholar Award, LMU.
• April 2021, Honorable Mentor Award. LMU Honors Program.
• May 2019, Paul L. Penfield Student Service Award. MIT EECS Department.
• May 2019, Semifinalist. MIT 100K Launch.
• April 2016, Service Award. Sidney Pacific Graduate Residence.
• April 2015, Fellowship. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG).
• March 2015, Honorable Mention. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.
• December 2014, Best Rated Poster Presentation Award: Demos. Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), South Lake Tahoe.

Grants

• March 2024, $50,000 Interdisciplinary Grant, LMU Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
• August 2023, $100,000 Research Gift, eBay.
• March 2023, $256,000 SBIR Phase II, NSF.
• May 2023, Academic Technology Grant, LMU.
• May 2023, Continuing Faculty Grant, LMU, Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
• August 2022, $50,000 Research Gift, eBay.
• May 2022, Faith and Justic Research Grant, LMU.
• December 2021, Capacity Building Grant, LMU, University Intercultural Council.
• May 2021, Continuing Faculty Grant, LMU, Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
• May 2021, Faith and Justice Course Development Grant, LMU.
• May 2020, Faith and Justice Research Grant, LMU.
• May 2020, Course Development Grant, LMU, Seaver College of Science and Engineering.
• September 2019-Present, Rains Research Assistance Fund, LMU.

Patents

• Korpusik, M. et al. A System and Method for Semantic Mapping of Natural Language Input to Database Entries via Convolutional Neural Networks. U.S. Patent 10817509, issued Oct. 27, 2020.
• Korpusik, M. et al. Behavior Prediction on Social Media Using Neural Networks. U.S. Patent 10453099, issued Oct. 22, 2019.

Teaching

• Fall 2021-Present Instructor, Machine Learning, Loyola Marymount University
• Fall 2020-Present Instructor, Natural Language Processing, Loyola Marymount University
• Spring 2020-Present Instructor, Computer Programming Lab, Loyola Marymount University
• Fall 2019-2023 Instructor, Computer Programming, Loyola Marymount University
• Summer 2016 CS Instructor, Women's Technology Program (WTP), MIT
• January 2016 Co-Instructor, IAP Speech and Language Processing Course, MIT
• Spring 2014 - 2017 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Project Mentor, CSAIL, MIT
• Spring 2015 Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program, Teaching and Learning Laboratory, MIT
• Spring 2012 Software Design Teaching Assistant, Olin College

Service and Leadership Activities

• Chair, Faculty Search Committee, LMU, Fall 2022-Spring 2023
• Organizer, ACL-IJCNLP Meta-learning for NLP Workshop, Bangkok, August 2021
• Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) STEM Leadership Institute, July 2021
• Panel Reviewer, NSF, Spring 2021
• Rising Stars EECS Workshop, MIT, October 2018
• I-Corps Program, MIT, Spring 2018
• Co-President, Graduate Women in EECS (GW6), MIT, Jan-Dec 2016
• Venture Mentoring Service, MIT, Nov 2015-Current
• Sandbox Program, MIT, Fall 2016
• Academic Chair, Graduate Student Association (GSA), MIT, Spring 2014 - 2016
• Athletics Chair, Graduate Student Association (GSA), MIT, Spring 2015 - 2016
• Inventory Chair, Sidney Pacific Graduate Residence, MIT, Spring 2015 - 2016
• President, Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Olin College, Spring 2012