Available — Research Scientist · Applied Scientist

Katarzyna
Szymaniak— in signals.

AI Researcher & Engineer working on adaptive machine learning for the messy, drifting signals around and within real human bodies — biosignals, audio, and the systems that try to read them.

PhD · University of Edinburgh · 2026
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01 — About

Who I am

2025

Most ML works when the world holds still. Real-world signals don't — so my work is about the models that keep up.

I'm a biomedical AI researcher with a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (December 2025), supervised by Prof. Kianoush Nazarpour. My thesis — Mitigating Confounding Factors in Myoelectric Control Through Adaptive Modelling and Learning — sits exactly where deep learning meets the inconvenient reality of biosignals: electrodes shift, postures change, users adapt to the model while the model is trying to adapt to them.

Before finishing the PhD I worked on multimodal sensor fusion and personalising foundation models at Meta Reality Labs in New York, building wristband interaction models that had to run with low latency in genuinely out-of-distribution conditions.

My research targets the core failure modes of deployed ML on continuous sensor data: non-stationarity, cross-user and cross-session distribution shift, label scarcity under real-world annotation budgets, and signal corruption from noise, motion artefacts, and environmental variability. These are shared bottlenecks across biosignal processing, wearable sensing, and audio — speaker variability, domain mismatch, acoustic noise robustness, and low-resource adaptation are structurally the same problems in a different modality. I currently work on extending these methods to audio and foundation-model adaptation. I work end-to-end: from experimental design and data curation through model development to deployment optimisation.

Currently, I'm looking for the next place to do this work in earnest — foundation models for audio and biosignals, Health AI, neural interfaces, or any research group that takes real-world robustness seriously.

Adaptation over accuracy

Static benchmarks tell us about a frozen world. The models that ship are the ones that keep working in the second week.

Cheap labels, sharp questions

Annotation budgets are the real constraint in clinical ML. Active learning and curation are first-class research, not engineering chores.

Signals before scale

EMG, EEG, ECG, IMU — each has its own physics. Architectures that respect the signal generalise farther than those that ignore it.

The body in the loop

The wearer adapts too. Co-adaptation is the design problem nobody warns you about — and the one most worth solving.

02 — Research

What I think about

Agenda · 2026 →

A research agenda for the post-scaling era of physiological ML. Below: the questions I want to spend the next decade on, organised from signal to system to person.

01

Distribution Shift in the Wild

Biosignals drift across days, electrodes, postures, sweat, and mood. The interesting science is identifying which shifts matter and building models that don't quietly fail when reality moves.

02

Foundation Models for Biosignals

PPG, EMG, ECG, EEG. What does pretraining on heterogeneous bodies actually give us, and what's the right tokenisation for a noisy, non-stationary, low-SNR signal?

03

Adaptive & Continual Learning

From session-level recalibration to lifelong adaptation. Closing the loop between the model and the wearer without catastrophic forgetting or runaway drift.

04

?Active & Preference Learning

When labelling is expensive — clinic time, expert annotation, RLHF — what is the smallest budget that still moves the model? Acquisition functions as first-class research objects.

05

Multimodal Sensor Fusion

EMG + IMU + audio + vision. Different noise floors, different sampling rates, different latencies. Fusion that respects the asymmetries rather than averaging them away.

06

Domain Generalisation

Most biosignal benchmarks measure within-session accuracy. Deployment doesn't. I'm interested in OOD-by-design evaluation, not OOD as a post-hoc surprise.

07

Physics-Informed ML

Skin, muscle, electrode placement and impedance all have a physics. Architectures that encode it as inductive bias generalise farther than those that brute-force it from data.

08

Human-in-the-Loop Systems

The wearer is not a passive data source. They learn the model while the model learns them. Co-adaptation has its own dynamics and its own failure modes.

09

From Lab to Limb

Translational work for prosthetic and rehabilitation users. The last 20% of distribution shift kills more devices than any other failure mode, and it lives in people's homes.

10

Time Series at the Edge

Low-power, low-latency inference on wristbands, patches, and implants. The constraints aren't an afterthought — they're often the most interesting part of the problem.

11

Robust Benchmarking

Designing evaluation protocols that surface failure modes before deployment does. Statistical rigour and cross-subject splits as a design principle, not a footnote.

12

Human-Centred AI

The reason for all of the above. Augmenting human capability — clinical, assistive, expressive — rather than automating around it.

03 — Papers

Selected publications

EurIPS Workshop 2025
to EMBC 2026

Position: Domain Generalisation in Myoelectric Control

K. Szymaniak, H. Gouk

Position paper benchmarking domain generalisation methods for robust myoelectric control across varying arm positions and contexts in EMG-based control. Accepted at the EurIPS Workshop on the Science of Benchmarking and Evaluating AI.

Distribution Shift Benchmarking EMG
IEEE TNSRE 2025

Deep Feature Learning from Electromyographic Signals for Gesture Recognition Systems

W. Zhong, X. Jiang, K. Szymaniak, M. Jabbari, C. Ma, K. Nazarpour

Position paper on deep learning approaches for EMG-based gesture recognition with improved feature representations. Published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

Deep Learning Feature Representation Gesture Recognition
Nature Sci. Data 2025

It's GREAT: Gesture REcognition for Arm Translation

K. Szymaniak, I. Kyranou,, K. Nazarpour

End-to-end experimental study isolating arm translation — same gesture, same user, different limb position — as a distribution shift in EMG-based control. Open dataset and benchmark released for reproducible work on adaptive prosthetic control.

Open Dataset Arm Translation Myoelectric Control
Front. Neurorobotics 2022

Recalibration of Myoelectric Control with Active Learning

K. Szymaniak, A. Krasoulis, K. Nazarpour

A human-in-the-loop active learning framework for long-term adaptation of myoelectric prostheses, defining optimal query strategies for robust EMG-based control.

Active Learning HITL Clinical
MRes Thesis 2020

Predicting Behaviour through Brain Data Analysis

K. Szymaniak, mentor: O. Mac Aodha

Applied deep learning to in vivo calcium imaging data from freely-behaving mice, predicting spatial navigation and exploratory behaviour through neuron activation mapping inspired by class activation techniques.

Calcium Imaging Computer Vision Neuroscience
MRes Thesis 2019

EEG Sequential Data Analysis in Decision Making

K. Szymaniak, mentors: J. Deng, X. Xie

Sequential deep learning approaches for EEG signal analysis, addressing time dependencies, non-stationarity, cross-channel connectivity, and memory mechanisms in brain–computer interfaces.

EEG BCI Sequence Models
Project · 2018
Best Student Project

Neuroimaging Data Analysis: HoloLens for Medical Education

K. Szymaniak

3D visualisation tool for MRI brain scans using Unity and Microsoft HoloLens, designed to improve spatial data comprehension for medical students. Awarded Best Student Project, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University.

Mixed Reality Volume Rendering HCI
04 — Projects

Selected projects

Hands-on · 2022 →
Industry Meta Reality Labs 2022–2023

Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Wristband Interactions

End-to-end ML pipeline for continuous navigation tasks via wristband biosignals, including supervised fine-tuning of foundation models, data curation, and deployment optimisation. Real-time inference for continuous gesture recognition with reduced latency, adapting off-the-shelf models to novel biosignal tasks for next-generation AR/VR input.

RESEARCH INTERN NEW YORK, USA
Open Dataset Benchmark EMG · Arm Translation

GREAT — Gesture REcognition for Arm Translation

An open EMG dataset and benchmark for one of the most under-studied confounders in myoelectric control: arm translation. Same gesture, same user, different limb posture in space — and the decoder falls apart. The dataset isolates that distribution shift, and the accompanying benchmark evaluates classical and deep learning approaches under it. Published in Nature Scientific Data. Repo hosted by the MoveR Digital Health & Care Hub.

NATURE SCI. DATA · 2025 Repo
Open Source Active Learning DPO / RLHF

Active Preference Learning for DPO Efficiency

Simulation fine-tuning Mistral-7B with an Active Preference Learning acquisition function for DPO, compared against random sampling under a fixed annotation budget. Win-rate plots show APL reaching higher performance with substantially less labelled preference data — same adaptive-data thesis from EMG, ported to language model alignment.

2025 GitHub
Award Mixed Reality 2018

HoloLens for Neuroimaging in Medical Education

Volumetric MRI rendered as an interactive 3D mesh in Unity, deployed to Microsoft HoloLens so medical students can manipulate brain anatomy in their physical environment. Awarded Best Student Project, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University.

BEST STUDENT PROJECT Demo
05 — Experience

The trajectory

2016 → 2025
Sep 2020 — Dec 2025

PhD, Biomedical Artificial Intelligence

University of Edinburgh · Edinburgh Neuroprosthetics Lab · Supervisor: Prof. Kianoush Nazarpour

Thesis: Mitigating Confounding Factors in Myoelectric Control Through Adaptive Modelling and Learning. Successfully defended December 2025. Focus on distribution shift, active learning, and domain generalisation in EMG-based control of upper-limb prostheses.

Sep 2023 — Jun 2024

Teaching Assistant — Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Edinburgh

Co-led a course bridging technical AI implementation with entrepreneurial problem-solving. Guided students in developing MVP solutions for real-world health and technology challenges.

Sep 2022 — Mar 2023

Research Scientist Intern

Meta Reality Labs · New York

Developed large-scale multimodal sensor fusion models for continuous navigation tasks in wristband-based interactions. End-to-end ML pipeline including data curation, SFT of foundation models, and deployment optimisation — contributing to next-generation AR/VR input systems.

2022

Oxford Machine Learning Summer School

University of Oxford

Intensive ML training across modern deep learning, probabilistic methods, and large-scale systems.

2019 — 2020

MRes, Biomedical Artificial Intelligence

University of Edinburgh

Computer vision and deep learning applied to in vivo calcium imaging of freely-behaving mice (with Prof. Oisin Mac Aodha & the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences) — neuron activation mapping for behaviour prediction.

2018 — 2019

MRes, Visual Computing

Swansea University · SeanseaVision Lab

Sequential deep learning for EEG analysis in decision-making contexts — time dependencies, non-stationarity, and cross-channel connectivity for brain–computer interfaces.

Jan 2017 — Sep 2019

Teaching Assistant & Lab Demonstrator

Swansea University · Department of Computer Science

Object-Oriented Programming (Java), data structures, and algorithms — for first- and second-year undergraduates.

2015 — 2018

BSc (Hons), Computer Science · First Class

Swansea University

Final-year project: HoloLens for medical neuroimaging education (Best Student Project, College of Science Award).

06 — Outreach

Workshops, organising & collaborations

2021 →
Co-organiser · 2021

Women in Machine Learning Workshop @ NeurIPS

Co-organised the WiML workshop, the largest community gathering for women researchers in machine learning, co-located with NeurIPS.

Co-organiser

Co-Design: Edinburgh Movement & Rehabilitation Hub

Co-organised a workshop bringing together clinicians, end-users, and ML researchers to scope adaptive, human-centred rehabilitation technology.

Co-organiser

Co-Creation in Neuroprosthetics

Workshop on participatory design for neuroprosthetic systems, foregrounding the lived experience of prosthesis users alongside technical research.

Teaching · 2023–2024

Entrepreneurship & Innovation (TA)

Co-taught a course on bridging technical AI implementation with MVP product development for health and technology contexts.

Collaborations & affiliations

Edinburgh Neuroprosthetics · Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences · ccBrain Lab, Cardiff · Samsung Research · Neuranics · Meta Reality Labs
07 — Contact

Let's talk

Open · 2026 →

The next role.
A collaboration.
A good problem.

I'm actively looking for Research Scientist and Applied Scientist roles in Health AI, neural interfaces, wearables, and foundation models for physiological data — in industry or applied research labs.

Particularly excited by groups that take real-world robustness, adaptation, and clinical translation seriously rather than as ablations at the end of a paper.

Edinburgh-based, comfortable relocating, fluent in long-haul flights and longer biosignal pipelines.