Shrikanth Narayanan

University Professor, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science; Professor of Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience; Professor of Pediatrics, Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery; and Niki and C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering
Shrikanth Narayanan
Email shri@sipi.usc.edu Office Phone (213) 740-6432

Center, Institute & Lab Affiliations

  • Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory,
  • Signal and Image Processing Institute,
  • USC Phonetics and Phonology Group,

Biography

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan received his M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D., all in electrical engineering, from UCLA in 1990, 1992, and 1995, respectively, and his bachelor of engineering in electrical engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy (Chennai, India) in 1988. From 1995-2000 he was with AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park and AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill–first as a Senior Member and later as a Prinicipal Member of its Techncial Staff. Currently he is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), and a Professor in the Signal and Image Processing Institute of USC’s Ming Hsieh Electrical & Computer Engineering department with joint appointments as Professor in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. He is also the inaugural director of the Ming Hsieh Institute and a Research Director for the Information Sciences Institute at USC. He was a Research Area Director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center at USC, and was the Research Principal for the USC Pratt and Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering, a unique partnership between academia and industry (2003-2007).

Shri Narayanan is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

Shri Narayanan serves as the inaugural VP for Education for the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2020-). He is an Editor for the Computer, Speech and Language Journal and an Associate Editor for the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing, having previously served as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (2016-2018) and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Speech and Audio Processing (2000-2004), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2005-2008), the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2008-2012), IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks (2014-2015), the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2010-2016) and the Journal of Acoustical Society of America (2009-2016). He holds or has held positions on the Speech Communication and Acoustic Standards committees of the Acoustical Society of America and the Advisory Council of the International Speech Communication Association, the BigData SIG (2014-2017) the Speech Processing Technical Committee (2003-2007) and on the Multimedia Signal Processing technical committee (2005-2008; 2014-present) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. At USC, he was Chair of the Joint Provost-Senate University Research Committee (2006-09) and, a Past President of the Phi Kappa Phi Academic Honor Society (2007-08).

Shri Narayanan is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi and Eta Kappa Nu. He held the inaugural Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC (2007-2016). He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award, USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, USC Engineering Junior and Senior Research Awards and Use-inspired research award, USC Electrical Engineering Northrop-Grumman Research award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, a USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award, an Okawa Research Award, IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2010), Google Faculty Research Award (2016), the 2011 UCLA Engineering Alumni Professional Achievement Award, a 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award from College of Engineering-Guindy (India) and a faculty fellowship from the USC Center for Interdisciplinary research. He is a recipient of a 2018 ISCA Best Journal Paper Award (for paper published in Computer Speech and Language Journal with Ming Li and Kyu Han), an Engineer’s Council 2015 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, a Ten Year Technical Impact Award from the 2014 ACM ICMI, a 2009 Best Transactions Paper award (with Chul Min Lee) and a 2005 Best Transactions Paper Award (with Alexandros Potamianos) from the IEEE Signal Processing society and was selected as Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-2011, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, and the 2017 Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA). Papers co-authored with his students have won awards at ACM-AVEC 2018 Emotion Gold-standard Subchallenge, 2018 Behavioral, Economic, and Socio-Cultural Computing Conference (Distinguished Research on Digital Humanities) Interspeech 2016, ICASSP 2016, Interspeech2015-Nativeness Challenge, Interspeech2014-Cognitive Load Challenge, Interspeech2013-Paralinguistics Challenge, Interspeech 2013, Interspeech2012-Speaker Trait Challenge, Interspeech2011-Speaker State Challenge, InterSpeech 2010, InterSpeech 2009-Emotion Challenge, IEEE DCOSS 2009, IEEE MMSP 2007, IEEE MMSP 2006, ICASSP 2005 and ICSLP 2002. His research interests are in signals and systems modeling with an interdisciplinary emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance. His laboratory is supported by federal (NSF, NIH, DARPA, IARPA, ONR, Army and DHS) and industry grants. He has published over 800 papers and has 17 granted U.S. patents.  His research and inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on the telecommunication services and AI based conversational assistance industry and Lyssn focused on mental health care delivery, treatment and quality assurance.

Education

  • Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, UCLA, 1/1995
  • M.S. Electrical Engineering, UCLA, 1/1990
  • Tenure Track Appointments

    • Senior Member / Principal Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park (formerly AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill), 01/01/1995 – 01/01/2000
  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    Human Communication and Information Processing: Theory & Applications of Signal Processing, Information/Estimation theory, Statistical Systems Modeling
    • Speech and Language Processing & Automatic Speech Recognition
    • Speech Production Modeling, Articulatory Acoustics, Speech Synthesis
    • Biomedical Signal Processing and Modeling; Imaging & Instrumentation for Speech Research
    • Human Machine Interaction; Multimodal-Multimedia Interfaces, Devices, and Systems

    • Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, 2019
    • USC Associates Award For Creativity In Research And Scholarship, , 2019
    • Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, Association for Psychological Science for “sustained and outstanding distinguished contributions to psychological science”, 2018
    • National Academy Member, National Academy of Inventors, 2017
    • Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, International Speech Communication Association for “contributions to speech communication science and technologies and their human-centered engineering applications.”, 2016
    • USC Endowed Chair, Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering, 2016
    • USC University Professor, , 2016
    • Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, of IEEE “for contributions to human-centric multimodal signal processing and applications”, 2009
    • Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, Fellow of Acoustical Society of America for “contributions to speech production and imaging”, 2005
    • NIH/NSF Career Development Award, NSF CAREER Award, 2003
    • USC Endowed Professorship, Andrew Viterbi Professor of Engineering, 2007-2016
    • Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2010-2011
    • American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, for “outstanding contributions to human communication science and technologies and their applications to engineering systems development.”, 2010-2011
    • USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award, 2010-2011
  • Administrative Appointments

    • Director, Ming Hsieh Institute
      http://mhi.usc.edu, 2010 –
  • Editorships and Editorial Boards

    • Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2010 –
    • Associate Editor, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009 –
    • Editor, Computer, Speech and Language Journal (Elsevier), 2007 –
    • Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2007 –
    • Associate Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2005 – 2008
    • Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 2000