Rate My Professor Visar Berisha

Visar Berisha is a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, holding a joint appointment in the College of Health Solutions. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University in 2007 and joined the university as faculty in Fall 2013. Appointed Associate Dean of Research and Commercialization in the Fulton Schools in 2024, Berisha oversees initiatives to advance research translation and commercialization. In 2015, he founded Aural Analytics, a company that leverages speech analysis to detect neurological health issues.

Berisha's research centers on the intersection of engineering and human health, developing machine learning and statistical signal processing tools to analyze speech for clinically relevant behavioral changes associated with neurological conditions. His work encompasses clinical speech AI, vocal biomarkers, dysarthria detection, aspiration risk prediction, cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease, and speech tracking in ALS. He has authored or co-authored over 180 research outputs, including highly cited papers such as “Digital Medicine and the Curse of Dimensionality” (NPJ Digital Medicine, 2021, 408 citations), “Tracking Discourse Complexity Preceding Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis: A Case Study Comparing the Press Conferences of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush” (Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 2015, 165 citations), “Sparse Representations for Automatic Target Classification in SAR Images” (2010 International Symposium on Communications, Control and Signal Processing, 233 citations), and “A Review of Automated Speech and Language Features for Assessment of Cognitive and Thought Disorders” (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 2019, 136 citations). His contributions have earned recognition as the 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecturer for the International Speech Communication Association, winner of the FTC Voice Cloning Challenge for OriginStory technology, and a $1 million Department of Defense grant in 2022 to enhance AI technology. Berisha’s publications have appeared in prominent outlets like Nature npj Digital Medicine, Brain and Language, and Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, with features in The New York Times, Wired, and Scientific American.