Abhishek Karwankar

👋 Welcome! I’m Abhishek, a second year Ph.D. student, advised by Dr. Matthew Louis Mauriello in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, where I design tangible and interactive user interfaces to support music composition, therapeutic engagement, and accessibility—particularly for children with autism and diverse sensory preferences. I also closely work with Dr. Daniel Stevens. My research has been funded by the Institute for Engineering Driven Health Grant and the Maggie E. Neumann Health Sciences Research Fund.

My research bridges human-computer interaction (HCI), information retrieval, machine learning, participatory design, accessibilty and visualizations, often through systems that combine multimodal music libraries, visualization-driven analysis, and emotion-aware recommender models. I develop tangible and immersive systems, and collaborate with music therapists, composers, and families to co-create meaningful, measurable experiences.

My work has been published at prestigious CS venues such as ACM SIGIR, ACM IDC, and AAAI ICWSM, and includes contributions to open-source tools, user interfaces for affective computing, and LLM-integrated pipelines for mental health datasets designed to support research in user experience, sentiment analysis, application evaluation, and human-AI collaboration.