Technology designed for what matters

"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

— Henry James, "The Middle Years," Scribner's Magazine, May 1893

The Nabrzyski Lab at the University of Notre Dame builds intelligent systems in service of human dignity. We work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and trusted computing, and we measure our success not by technical novelty alone but by whether our work makes a real difference in people's lives.

VOICE4PIMD is the heart of that mission. People with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) communicate through subtle expressions, sounds, and movements that even those closest to them can struggle to interpret. VOICE4PIMD combines contact-free sensing with AI models trained for each individual person, so that a smile, a sound, or a change in heart rate can be recognized and understood. The goal is to help people who cannot speak be heard, and to give them greater agency over their own lives. We develop this work together with families, who help teach our models who their loved ones are, and with clinicians, caregivers, students, and international partners, including the European team behind INSENSION. We often work in the dark, trying to understand people who cannot tell us whether we have understood them. That uncertainty is exactly why we approach this work with humility, honesty, and care.

The lab collaborates broadly across campus and beyond, including through NSF CI Compass, the NSF Center for Quantum Technologies, and international partners. Our students work on problems that matter outside the lab — from edge-AI seizure detection deployed on low-power devices to blockchain-based provenance for critical supply chains — and our research has led to startups, patents, and technologies in active use by industry and government partners.