STORY: Dongim Lee ’27 & PInT Receive Honorable Mention for AAAS Presentation

In February, Dongim Lee ’27 presented at the 2025 Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Boston. As a result of her presentation, “Linguistic Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition for People Who Stutter,” Lee and PInT received the Undergraduate Honorable Mention in the Social Sciences category from AAAS, and were recognized in the April edition of Science.

Dongim Lee stands next to a screen with her presentation poster.

Lee presents PInT's poster at the 2025 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. The poster, created by Lee, Sreesanth Adelli ’28, Troy Anderson ’28, Anna Du ’28, Anika Mahesh ’28, Xavier Nishikawa ’28 and Kenneth Xiong ’27, examined how voice technology can be made more accessible for everyone.

The poster, created by Lee, Sreesanth Adelli ’28, Troy Anderson ’28, Anna Du ’28, Anika Mahesh ’28, Xavier Nishikawa ’28 and Kenneth Xiong ’27, examined how voice technology can be made more accessible for everyone. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) team was advised by assistant professor Victoria Dean.

“As a team lead, I’m so proud of our amazing team, and it was an incredible experience to share our work at the conference,” said Lee. “Receiving this honorable mention affirms the importance of accessible technology and encourages us to continue being mindful of marginalized communities when developing AI solutions. I hope this recognition inspires others to do the same.”

AAAS logo at the top. The text in bold blue text reads, "Science shaping tomorrow." Below that is the award name, which reads, "Student E-poster Competition 2025 AAAS ANNUAL MEETING. UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT HONORABLE MENTION category of Social Sciences is hereby awarded to DONGIM LEE." The award is signed by Willie E. May, PhD, President of AAAS and Chair of the 2025 Annual Meeting, and Sudip S. Parikh, PhD, the Chief Executive Officer of AAAS and Executive Publisher of Science Journals.

The certificate Lee received for her presentation.

The group’s research focused on how to improve ASR models and fine-tune them to better recognize stuttered speech in English and Mandarin. ASR models often struggle to understand people who stutter (PWS), which makes everyday technology less accessible for 80 PWS. By reducing the error rates by 14.2% in English and 47.4% in Mandarin, the team’s work takes a major step toward more inclusive AI.

“In PInT, we’re all about molding technology to serve the public interest,” said Xiong, 2024-2025 president of The Council of Olin Representatives (CORe). “One of our primary values is strengthening our ability to engage critically with all sorts of innovation. Being able to watch this group of students not just interact closely with state-of-the-art AI models, but also consider how they interact with different people and cultures is what PInT is all about.”

View the team's poster, and see a full list of the AAAS awards here.