Professor Heidi Christensen

简介

I am a Professor and the Head of the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. My research is situated at the intersection of speech technology, AI, and healthcare, where I focus on developing machine learning systems that use spontaneous speech and language biomarkers to detect early signs of clinical conditions.A major focus of my work is CognoSpeak™, an automated, remote assessment tool for cognitive impairment. We are currently expanding these technologies to support stroke recovery and Motor Neurone Disease (MND).Beyond my research, I am a dedicated advocate for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), having previously served as the Faculty Director of EDI and led the University to a successful Athena SWAN Silver institutional renewal. I currently have over 3,800 ci

代表成果

• Illingworth CH, Pahar M, Braun D, Sproson L, Khan H, Mirheidari B, O'Malley R, Abdi S, Jama M, Yussuf I , Wang C et al (2026) Assessing the utility of automated and pen‐and‐paper cognitive assessment tools for underrepresented groups in the UK. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 41(6). View this article in WRRO
• Ramnarine I, Blackburn D, Christensen H, Harkness K, Pahar M, Chen C & Bell SM (2026) ABSTRACT NUMBER: ESOC2026YS131 FACING UP TO STROKE: ANALYSING FACIAL EXPRESSION USING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES POST-STROKE. European Stroke Journal, 11(Supplement_1), i675-i675.
• Leung W-Z, Christensen H & Goetze S (2026) Towards automating the Frenchay dysarthria assessment: Can neural phoneme posteriorgrams inform the analysis of dysarthric speech?. Speech Communication, 179, 103379-103379.
• Pahar M, Illingworth CH, Braun D, Mirheidari B, Sproson L, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2026) Can we trust AI to detect healthy multilingual English speakers among the cognitively impaired cohort in the UK? An investigation using real-world conversational speech.. CoRR, abs/2602.13047.
• Yue Z, Loweimi E, Cvetkovic Z, Barker J & Christensen H (2026) Raw acoustic-articulatory multimodal dysarthric speech recognition. Computer Speech & Language, 95, 101839-101839.
• Pahar M, Tao F, Mirheidari B, Bright R, Gadgil S, Illingworth CH, Braun DA, Sproson L, O'Malley R, Christensen H & Blackburn DJ (2025) CognoSpeak: An automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline using speech. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 21(S2).
• Illingworth CH, Khan H, Braun DA, Sproson L, Pahar M, Mirheidari B, Christensen H, Blackburn DJ & Goodwin S (2025) Developing a more equitable language‐based automated assessment of cognition: CognoSpeak. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 21(S3).
• Pahar M, Mirheidari B, Illingworth C, Braun D, Tao F, Sproson L, Blackburn D & Christensen H (2025) Automatic Detection of Early Cognitive Decline Using Multimodal Feature Fusion and Transfer Learning on Real-World Conversational Speech. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 29(12), 8727-8734.
• Pahar M, Tao F, Mirheidari B, Bright R, Gadgil S, Illingworth CH, Braun DA, Sproson L, O'Malley R, Christensen H & Blackburn DJ (2025) CognoSpeak: An automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline using speech. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(Suppl 2).
• Illingworth CH, Khan H, Braun DA, Sproson L, Pahar M, Mirheidari B, Christensen H, Blackburn DJ & Goodwin S (2025) Developing a more equitable language‐based automated assessment of cognition: CognoSpeak. Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 21(Suppl 3).