Catarina Botelho
From HLT@INESC-ID
Catarina Botelho received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, in 2018, and completed her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering also from IST in 2024. Her research, conducted at INESC-ID, focuses on speech as a biomarker for disease detection, particularly in conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea, Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and COVID-19. Her MSc and PhD work has been distinguished by two awards from IST and the University of Lisbon.
Currently, she is a researcher at INESC-ID, contributing to the Accelerat.AI project. She has held positions as a research intern at Google AI, Toronto, and as a visiting researcher at the Cognitive Systems Lab, University of Bremen. She was involved in the student advisory committee of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA-SAC), since 2020 to 2023, acting as Coordinator in 2022. Her scientific interests lie on speech and language technology for healthcare, and their combination with other modalities.
Her scientific interests focus on speech and language technology for healthcare. She is particularly motivated to leverage low-resource solutions to make impactful contributions, fostering improvements in healthcare accessibility and promoting social good.
Total Publications: 17
Article (Author)
- Unveiling Interpretability in Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Parkinson's Diagnosis
David Gimeno-Gómez, Catarina Botelho, Anna Maria Pompili, Alberto Abad, Carlos-D. Martínez-Hinarejos,
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, pages 1-14, DOI 10.1109/JSTSP.2025.3539845, February 2025 - Speech as a Biomarker for Disease Detection
Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Tanja Schultz, Isabel Trancoso,
IEEE Access, vol. 12, pages 184487 - 184508, DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3506433, November 2024
In Proceedings (Author)
- Macro-descriptors for Alzheimer’s disease detection using large language models
Catarina Botelho, John Mendonça, Anna Maria Pompili, Tanja Schultz, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso,
Interspeech, September 2024 - Towards Reference Speech Characterization for Health Applications
Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Tanja Schultz, Isabel Trancoso,
INTERSPEECH, pages 2363-2367, ISCA, August 2023 - Challenges of using longitudinal and cross-domain corpora on studies of pathological speech
Catarina Botelho, Tanja Schultz, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso,
Proc. Interspeech 2022, pages 1921-1925, September 2022 - Exploring Dementia Detection from Speech: Cross Corpus Analysis
Ayimnisagul Ablimit, Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Tanja Schultz, Isabel Trancoso,
ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), IEEE, pages 6472-6476, IEEE, May 2022 - Visual Speech for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection
Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Tanja Schultz, Isabel Trancoso,
Interspeech 2021, pages 2516--2520, August 2021 - Transfer Learning-Based Cough Representations for Automatic Detection of COVID-19
Rubén Solera Ureña, Catarina Botelho, Francisco Teixeira, Thomas Rolland, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso,
Interspeech 2021, pages 436--440, International Speech Communication Association, August 2021 - The in-the-Wild Speech Medical Corpus
M. Joana Correia, Francisco Teixeira, Catarina Botelho, Isabel Trancoso, Bhiksha Raj,
ICASSP 2021 - IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, IEEE, pages 6973-6977, IEEE, June 2021 - Toward Silent Paralinguistics: Speech-to-EMG–Retrieving Articulatory Muscle Activity from Speech
Catarina Botelho, Lorenz Diener, Dennis Küster, Kevin Scheck, Shahin Amiriparian, Björn W Schuller, Tanja Schultz, Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso,
Interspeech 2020, October 2020 - Profiling speech for clinical applications
Isabel Trancoso, Francisco Teixeira, M. Joana Correia, Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Bhiksha Raj,
(Keynote paper) SPECOM - 22nd International Conference on Speech and Computer, St. Petersburg, Russia, October 2020 - Towards Silent Paralinguistics: Deriving Speaking Mode and Speaker ID from Electromyographic Signals
Lorenz Diener, Shahin Amiriparian, Catarina Botelho, Kevin Scheck, Dennis Küster, Isabel Trancoso, Björn W Schuller, Tanja Schultz,
, October 2020 - Speech – a health biomarker
Isabel Trancoso, M. Joana Correia, Francisco Teixeira, Catarina Botelho, Alberto Abad, Bhiksha Raj,
(Keynote paper) International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, LNCS and LNAI, Springer, vol. 12037, Springer, Évora, Portugal, March 2020 - Speech as a (private?) biomarker for speech affecting diseases
Isabel Trancoso, M. Joana Correia, Francisco Teixeira, Alberto Abad, Catarina Botelho, Bhiksha Raj,
(Keynote) ICIEA 2019 - The 14th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications, IEEE, IEEE, Xi'an, China, June 2019 - Speech as a Biomarker for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection
Catarina Botelho, Isabel Trancoso, Alberto Abad, Teresa Paiva,
ICASSP 2019, IEEE, pages 5851--5855, IEEE, Brighton, UK, May 2019
Thesis (Author)
- Speech as a Biomarker for Sleep Disorders and Sleep Deprivation
Catarina Botelho, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal, Thesis, November 2018
Total Supervisions: 1
Master's Theses
- Leveraging LLMs as experts for multi-lingual detection of speech-affecting diseases
João Lima
Alberto Abad (advisor), Catarina Botelho (coadvisor)
Master's Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2024-08-19 - 2025-09-30
Total Projects: 1
National Projects
- ACCELERAT.AI - ACCELERAT.AI
DEFINED AI, IAPMEI, Societal Digital Transformation, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, FFCUL, NOS Comunicações, Devscope - Soluções De Sistemas E Tecnologias De Formação, S.A., INESC-ID Lisboa, FCiências.ID - Associação para a Investigação e Desenvolvimento de Ciências2023-01-01 - 2025-12-21