FORGE Student Spotlight: Kanagha Santhoshini Sivakumar

Northwestern Engineering’s Kanagha Santhoshini Sivakumar builds AI speech recognition tools and pipelines to aid in diagnosis associated with child speech-language pathology.

A student in Northwestern Engineering’s Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program with a background in software engineering, Sivakumar is a member of the Pediatric Speech Technologies and Acoustics Research (PedzSTAR) Lab, directed by Professor Marisha Speights.

Aiming to bridge the gap between her domain expertise and applied AI technologies, Sivakumar joined the inaugural FORGE cohort this summer. FORGE is an initiative of Northwestern’s Network for Collaborative Intelligence (NNCI). It serves as a hub for AI innovation, hands-on experimentation, and interdisciplinary problem solving. Working alongside Northwestern faculty, staff, and external partners, student teams work directly on high-impact problems, developing prototypes, analytical models, proof-of-concept demonstrations, and exploratory research findings.