Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering and University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology
Education
- 1990, Master's Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of California - Los Angeles
- 1988, Bachelor's Degree, Electrical Engineering, Anna University
- Doctoral Degree, Electrical Engineering, University of California - Los Angeles
Biography
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and serves as the inaugural Vice President for Presidential Initiatives on the Senior Leadership Team of USC's President. He is 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, a Research Director for the Information Sciences Institute at USC and a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. He held the inaugural Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC (2007-2016). He was also 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).
Prior to USC, from 1995-2000, he was with AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park and AT&T Bell Labaratories, Murray Hill--first as a Senior Member and later as a Principal Member of its Technical Staff. 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.
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 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC). Shri Narayanan is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also a member of the professional honor societies Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi and Eta Kappa Nu.
Shri Narayanan has received several honors and awards including the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (IEEE Technical Field Award), 2024 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the 2023 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2023 IEEE SPS Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award (for contributions to spoken language processing technologies and their societal applications) from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the 2020 ACM ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award. His research publications have received the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History (for paper published in Digital Humanities Quarterly with Gabor Toth, Tim Hempel, Krishna Somandepalli), a 2018 ISCA Best Journal Paper Award (for paper published in Computer Speech and Language Journal with Ming Li and Kyu Han), the Ten Year Technical Impact Award from ACM ICMI in 2014, a 2009 Best Transactions (Journal) Paper award (with Chul Min Lee) and a 2005 Best Transactions Paper Award (with Alexandros Potamianos) from the IEEE Signal Processing society for papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing.
Papers co-authored with his students have won recognition at MediaEval 2020 (Emotions and Themes in Music), 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.
Shri Narayanan received the Engineer's Council 2015 Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, and was selected as IEEE 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). Shri Narayanan has also received an NSF CAREER award, a Okawa Research Award, IBM Faculty Awards (2008, 2010), Google Faculty Research Award (2016), Amazon Research Award (2020), the 2011 UCLA Engineering Alumni Professional Achievement Award, a 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award from College of Engineering - Guindy (India). Shri Narayanan has also been recognized at USC for his research, service and mentoring including with a USC Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship, a faculty fellowship for Interdisciplinary research, USC Viterbi Engineering Junior and Senior Research Awards and Use-inspired research award, USC Electrical Engineering Northrop-Grumman Research award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, and a USC Distinguished Faculty Service Award from the Academic Senate.
Shri Narayanan served as the inaugural VP for Education for the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2020-22). He is an Editor for the Computer, Speech and Language Journal and a Senior Editorial Board member 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), the Journal of Acoustical Society of America (2009-2016) and the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing (2011-2020). 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; 2014-2020), Nomination & Appointments Committee (2023-24) of the IEEE Signal Processing Societya He has also served in several leadership roles in organizing conferences and workshops of professional societies such as IEEE, ISCA, and ACM. 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).
Research Summary
Shri Narayanan’s interdisciplinary research focuses on human-centered sensing/imaging, signal processing, and machine intelligence centered on human communication, interaction, emotions, and behavior. His work has a special emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance in defense, security, health, media and the arts. His laboratory is supported by federal (NSF, NIH, DARPA, IARPA, ONR, Army and DHS) and various foundation and industry grants. He has published over 1000 papers and has 19 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.
HUMAN-CENTERED SENSING, COMPUTING AND INFORMATION PROCESSING
-Human-centered Signal Processing and Machine Learning
-Behavioral Signal Processing, Emotions, Behavioral Informatics
-Speech and Language Processing, Automatic Speech/Speaker Recognition, Speech Translation
-Multimedia Signal Processing, Computational Media Intelligence
-Human-Machine and Mediated Interactions; Spoken dialog and Multimodal Systems; Virtual Humans
-Speech production modeling, Articulatory-Acoustics, Speech/Audio Synthesis; Audio/Music
-Biomedical Signal Processing and Modeling: Imaging & Instrumentation
