Diwakar Krishnamurthy
Professor, Department of Electrical and Software Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering
Dr. Diwakar Krishnamurthy is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary. He has more than two decades of experience in conducting high impact software systems research. He has led many successful collaborations with multiple industry partners and community organizations spanning areas such as big data, machine learning, cloud computing, digital health, multimedia systems, extended reality, and assistive technologies. His research has yielded multiple patents and has been published in top journals and conferences such as the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing. Dr. Krishnamurthy has served in the organization committees of IEEE and ACM sponsored conferences and has launched international collaborations with colleagues in USA, India, UK, and Europe. He co-led the digital transformation initiative of the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary (UCalgary). In this role, he was instrumental in launching a one-of-a-kind digital minor program that allows undergraduate students to augment their domain knowledge with advanced programming and AI skills. Dr. Krishnamurthy has won a number of awards including the Engineering Students’ Society’s Professor of the Year award and the U of C GREAT Supervisor Award.
Approximately 1 in 3 individuals on the autism spectrum are nonspeaking, i.e., they cannot communicate their inner thoughts and desires reliably via speech. Unfortunately, nonspeakers are often misunderstood by others. Specifically, their inability to speak is often mistaken as an inability to think. Due to these misconceptions, nonspeakers are often ignored in research that seeks to build technology aimed at assisting them. The lack of engagement with this community has caused a vacuum in assistive technologies that can truly foster the inclusion of nonspeaking autistic people in social, educational, and community settings. My research is addressing this problem by co-designing next generation communication and education technologies in direct collaboration with non-speakers, their families, and professionals who work with them. My early participatory design fueled research has proposed innovative uses of Extended Reality (XR) for supporting nonspeaking autistic people. The Parex Resources innovation fellowship will be used to translate this research into technology that becomes widely used in real-world settings. Specifically, with the help of community advocacy groups such as Autism Calgary, the extra research time afforded by the fellowship will be used to integrate research prototypes into practice, e.g., by supporting the practices of autism focused schools and professionals whose caseloads consist of nonspeaking autistic people. The fellowship will also be leveraged to mentor trainees in my lab and beyond on social innovation and entrepreneurship activities centered on assistive technology for nonspeakers. As part of this training, events such as guest lectures by autism and XR experts, workshops with nonspeaking self-advocates, hackathons, and pitch competitions will be organized."
Diwakar Krishnamurthy, Professor