News
Our journal article on the AI-based intuitive eating application for improving diet quality has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Medical Internet Research Human Factors! If you are interested in learning more, please check out our website.
About me
I graduated with my PhD from MIT in 2019 and am now a recently tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at Loyola Marymount University. 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 & Presentations
- A Smart Phone App to Improve Intuitive Eating and Diet Quality: Design and Usability Study
Mandy Korpusik, Delaram YazdanSepas, Hawley C. Almsted
Journal of Medical Internet Research Human Factors, June 2026.
- ESMfluc: Predicting flexible regions in a protein using language models
Ngoc K. Tran, Mandy Korpusik, Zara Alavi
29th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2025), April 2025.
- A Novel Undergraduate Research Program for Underrepresented Sophomore Students: Forming STEM Research Communities
Tanya Kuzmenko*, Barbara Marino*, Emily Hawkins, Mandy Korpusik, Katie Mouzakis, Caio Sousa (*presenters)
ConnectUR, June 16, 2025.
- A Novel Undergraduate Research Program for Underrepresented Sophomore Students: Curriculum to Prepare Students for Research
Mandy Korpusik*, Emily Hawkins*, Tanya Kuzmenko, Katie Mouzakis, Barbara Marino, Caio Sousa (*presenters)
ConnectUR, June 24, 2025.
- 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.
- Food for Thought: Third place winners - Binary classification with pre-trained BERT
Yifan Hu, Mandy Korpusik
Real World Data Science, August 21, 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 [video]
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
- Intro to AI Workshop for Engineers
Northrop Grumman, December 2025
- 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
- 2026-2027, Habitable Worlds Faculty Fellow, LMU.
- Spring 2026, LMU Award for Excellence in Mission Integration.
- 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
- May 2026, $17,000 LMU HHMI Mini-Grant for the Computer Science Department.
- May 2026, Seaver Responsible Integration of AI in Curriculum, Research, and Innovation Summer Scholarly Work Grant.
- August 2025, $50,000 Research Gift, eBay.
- 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 I, 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
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, Seaver College DEI Committee, LMU, Fall 2024-Spring 2025
- 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
