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Welcome!
Welcome!
I'm a 6th-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, advised by Prof. Nima Mesgarani. My research is dedicated to transforming how people hear in complex acoustic environments. I develop brain-controlled hearing systems that decode neural signals in real time to determine the talker a listener is focused on. These systems then selectively amplify that voice, enabling effortless communication in noisy, multi-talker settings.
Over the course of my Ph.D., I’ve gained broad, hands-on experience across the entire research and development pipeline. This includes designing experiments, collecting and pre-processing neural and audio datasets, training machine learning models, and deploying them for real-time inference. I’ve also led cross-functional collaborations and projects, and conducted large-scale user studies to evaluate system performance in realistic listening conditions. My work involves analyzing multi-channel time series data from audio signals and invasive brain recordings, bridging signal processing, auditory neuroscience, and machine learning. Recently, I’ve been exploring GenAI, with a focus on how foundation models and large language models can augment human perception.
In industry, I interned at Bose in Summer 2024, where I prototyped feed-forward noise cancellation algorithms. In Summer 2025, I completed a Research Internship at Meta Reality Labs, where I worked on multimodal sensing for the newly announced Ray-Ban AI Display glasses.
Outside the lab, I enjoy listening to soulful music and experimenting with smoothie recipes. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Palakkad, where I graduated as class valedictorian and received the Institute Gold Medal. I'm passionate about traveling, learning new skills, and connecting with people.
I invite you to explore my work, and I hope you enjoy your visit.
Sincerely,
Vishal Choudhari
Updates
Updates
2025
October — Our paper “Bridging Ears and Eyes” won the Best Paper Award at WASPAA 2025! Read it here.
October — Received M.Phil. in Electrical Engineering, now onto the final stretch of my Ph.D. journey.
October — Presented Brain-Controlled Selective Hearing at the 2025 BCI Award Ceremony on October 7th. [livestream]
September — Our work on Real-Time Brain-Controlled Selective Hearing system got nominated for the 2025 International BCI Award.
August — Completed a rewarding internship at Meta Reality Labs, where I worked on prototyping multimodal sensing for the newly announced Ray-Ban AI Display glasses.
July — Published “Bridging Ears and Eyes” at WASPAA 2025, showing sensory biases in audio & video foundation models and proposing cross-modal distillation for improved sound classification. Paper published here.
June — Prof. Nima Mesgarani delivered the concluding keynote at CogHear 2025 on our latest work on brain-controlled selective hearing at the University of Maryland (College Park).
June — Presenting our work on real-time brain-controlled selective hearing at the 11th International BCI Meeting in Banff, Canada.
May — Our paper AAD-LLM was accepted to ACL 2025! We introduce a brain-informed auditory LLM that aligns machine listening with human attention in complex multitalker scenes. [arXiv] [Website]
May — Joined Meta Reality Labs in Redmond for a summer internship with the Audio Research Team, working on multimodal sensing for smart glasses.
May — Prof. Nima Mesgarani delivered invited talks on our real-time brain-controlled selective hearing research at the University of Maryland (College Park), the Sensation and Action Meeting (Thun, Switzerland), and ETH Zurich.
April — Delivered an invited keynote on brain-controlled selective hearing at g.tec’s BCI & Neurotech Spring Event.
February — Spoke at ARO MidWinter Meeting (Orlando, FL) on our user study in brain-controlled selective hearing. Prof. Mesgarani gave a keynote on our real-time BCI work. Received a travel award.
2024
November — Accepted Summer 2025 internship offer from Meta Reality Labs to work on multimodal sensing for smart glasses.
November — Passed thesis proposal exam and completed M.Phil. requirements.
November — Our paper on brain-controlled selective hearing for moving talkers was published in Advanced Science. Read it here.
November — Featured on the Columbia Engineering Instagram page.
October — Our work on brain-controlled selective hearing for moving talkers was featured by the Columbia Electrical Engineering Department.
October — Won 3rd Place at the 2024 International BCI Award Competition for our system on brain-controlled selective hearing with moving talkers (out of 80 global submissions).
September — Returned to Columbia after a rewarding internship at Bose.
August — Presented our user study on brain-controlled selective hearing at IHCON & IHAS in Tahoe City, CA. Received a travel award.
June — Joined Bose (Framingham, MA) as a Summer Research Intern in the Noise Cancellation Team.
2023
November — Accepted Summer 2024 internship offer from Bose to work on feed-forward noise cancellation.
July — Presented at IEEE EMBC in Sydney on improving auditory attention decoding using self-supervised speech representations. Paper published here.
June — Spoke at CogHear in College Park on brain-controlled selective hearing for moving talkers.
2022
November — Presented work on brain-controlled selective hearing for moving talkers at SfN and APAN (San Diego).
February — Presented at ARO on decoding auditory spatial attention from invasive brain signals.
2021
December — Received M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.
November — Presented spatial attention decoding work at SfN and APAN.
2020
September — Began MS/PhD program at Columbia University in Prof. Nima Mesgarani’s group.
May — Graduated from IIT Palakkad with a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering. Named valedictorian and awarded Institute Gold Medal.
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