Pediatric Surgical Research Monthly Meeting Nov 4 2025 Kathleen Fraser - Speech Analysis using NLP

Analyzing Patient Speech with Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Kathleen Fraser is an associate professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and the social impacts of these technologies.

One aspect of her research examines the social biases that end up being encoded in artificial intelligence systems. She has co-authored multiple papers on ethical considerations in NLP on topics such as racial and gender biases in image generation models, ethical and human rights issues in toxic language detection, and detecting and mitigating stereotypes spread on social media.

She also conducts research on issues related to AI safety, in particular looking at how user modifications to frontier models (such as fine-tuning) affect the safety profiles of those models. She has actively worked with the Canadian AI Safety Institute and represented Canada as a technical expert at the first meeting of the International Network of Safety Institutes in San Francisco in 2024.

Her research interests also include NLP for health care, specifically the automated analysis of speech and language in conditions such as dementia, aphasia and post-COVID condition (“long COVID”).

Kathleen Fraser received her PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto and subsequently completed a post-doc at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was a research officer at the National Research Council from 2018 to 2025, where she was awarded the “Rising Star” award in 2024. She joined the University of Ottawa in the fall of 2025.
https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-engine...