Research Outputs

Selected First-Author Publications

• Pahar, M. et al., 2026. PROCESS-2: A Benchmark Speech Corpus for Early Cognitive Impairment Detection. arXiv:2605.14888 (Under review: Nature Scientific Data)
• Pahar, M. et al., 2025. Automatic detection of early cognitive decline using multimodal feature fusion and transfer learning on real-world conversational speech. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 29(12). pp.8727-8734. IEEE (Best-paper award)
• Pahar, M. et al., 2025. CognoSpeak: an automatic, remote assessment of early cognitive decline in real-world conversational speech. In 2025 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Health and Medicine (CIHM). (pp 1-7). IEEE
• Pahar, M. and Liu, Q., 2024. NanoCNN: A CNN-Based Tool to Detect RNA m⁶A Methylations Using Oxford Nanopore Sequencing. In 2024 4th International Conference on Electrical, Computer, Communications and Mechatronics Engineering (ICECCME) (pp. 1-6). IEEE
• Pahar, M. et al., 2023. Accelerometer-based Bed Occupancy Detection for Automatic, Non-invasive Long-term Cough Monitoring. IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 30739-30752. IEEE
• Pahar, M. et al., 2022. Automatic Tuberculosis detection in cough patterns using NLP-style cough embeddings. In 2022 International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (ICEET) (pp. 1-6). IEEE
• Pahar, M. et al., 2022. COVID-19 detection in cough, breath and speech using deep transfer learning and bottleneck features. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 141, p. 105153. Elsevier
• Pahar, M. et al., 2022. Automatic non-invasive Cough Detection based on Accelerometer and Audio Signals. Journal of Signal Processing Systems. Springer
• Pahar, M. et al., 2022. Wake-Cough: cough spotting and cougher identification for personalised long-term cough monitoring. In 2022 30th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) (pp. 185-189). IEEE
• Pahar, M. et al., 2021. Deep Neural Network based Cough Detection using Bed-mounted Accelerometer Measurements. In ICASSP 2021 (pp. 8002-8006). IEEE
• Pahar, M. et al., 2021. COVID-19 cough classification using machine learning and global smartphone recordings. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 135, p.104572, Elsevier
• Pahar, M. et al., 2021. Automatic Cough Classification for Tuberculosis Screening in a Real-World Environment. Physiological Measurement, 42(10), p.105014. IOPscience

Awards

• 2025 – Best-paper award at JBHI
• 2021 – Top-20 postdoctoral award in Stellenbosch University.

Funding Applications

• Successful (senior investigator): EDCTP, CAGE-TB collaborative project between Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Germany, Netherlands and Uganda, €3m
• Unsuccessful (co-PI), re-applying: NIHR i4i (invention for innovation), developing and implementing CognoMemory into Memory assessment pathways, collaboration with Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), £1.5m

Editorial Board Member

• Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
• Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Modern Medicine

Peer Review Team Member

• IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
• IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems
• Journal of Biomedical Informatics
• Biomedical Signal Processing and Control
• Computers in Biology and Medicine
• ICASSP 2025, 2026, 2027
• Interspeech 2025
• Interspeech 2026

Invited Talks, Keynote Addresses, and Session Chairs

• 27-30 Sept 2026 – Session Chair Interspeech 2026
• 26 Feb 2026 – EDI Focused Research Showcase
• 6-11 Apr 2025 – Session Chair ICASSP 2025
• 2024–2026 – CMI Townhall
• 4 July 2025 – Insigneo Showcase 2025
• 23 June 2025 – SLT-CDT
• 13 May 2024 – Pint of Science: Artificial brains diagnosing drains (and disease!)
• 11 May 2023 – 2nd Global Webinar on AI, Machine Learning & Data Science
• 7-9 Oct 2022 – 4th International Conference on AI (AIAM2022), IEEE, Germany
• 29 Aug – 2 Sep 2022 – Session chair of EUSIPCO 2022 at Belgrade, Serbia
• 20-22 July 2022 – Session chair of ICECET 2022 at Prague, Czech Republic
• 18 July 2022 – AI Expo, Belgium
• 1-3 Dec 2021 – CHPC National Conference 2021, South Africa
• 10-12 Nov 2021 – Organizer and session chair of 2021 Postdoctoral Conference "Beyond The Pandemic: Research Now And In The Future", South Africa
• 28-29 Oct 2021 – National Seminar cum Workshop at BIT, Mesra, India
• 2020, 2021 – CHPC (Advancing high-performance computing in South Africa)
• 17-18 July 2020 – ELECTROSYMP-20, VIT Bhopal University, India

International Collaborations, and Academic Responsibilities

• 2024 – Successfully established collaborations with the Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN) and Professor Annalena Venneri and her group for investigating data cohorts consisting attention, memory and executive functions to detect early signs of cognitive decline.
• 2024 – Successfully embarked on a collaboration with Dr Chaona Chen to use facial cues collected from the CognoSpeak video interview to analyse dementia, mood disorder and depression.
• 2024 – Actively teaching COM4520 Darwin Project and co-supervising undergraduate and PhD students at the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
• 2024-2027 – Member of Senate Appeals and Discipline Panels at the University of Sheffield.
• 2023 – Co-supervised and supported a PhD student in bioinformatics and genetic data analysis for RNA sequencing at UNLV.
• 2021-2023 – Monitoring the long-term recovery of TB patients with the biomedical team at UPPSALA university (Sweden) & TASK (South Africa).
• 2019-2023 – Successful co-supervision of 2 masters and 2 skripsie (short-term undergraduate project) students at Stellenbosch University.
• 2022 – Mentored students from four different continents in UN's Future 17 Sustainable Development Goals Programme.
• 2022 – Executive committee member of postdoc society (PDS Exec 2022).
• 2021 – Regional judge at Eskom Expo for young scientists.