USC professor’s tech has improved autism prognosis

Due to his work, medical professionals can higher diagnose and monitor autism, despair, and different situations.

Anybody utilizing digital assistants has benefitted from Narayanan’s analysis in understanding and decoding human feelings from speech. The assistants are actually extra intuitive, they usually can higher perceive and reply to a consumer’s instructions.

It’s additionally simpler now to be taught a brand new language because of instruments he developed that present suggestions on how you can pronounce phrases.

Narayanan is a professor {of electrical} engineering, pc science, linguistics, psychology, pediatrics, and otolaryngology on the College of Southern California, in Los Angeles. He additionally heads USC’s Sign Evaluation and Interpretation Laboratory and holds a number of different educational positions throughout the college. He’s a visiting college researcher at Google DeepMind in Los Angeles.

Narayanan obtained the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award for his contributions to speech communication science and applied sciences for inclusive human-centered engineering. The award is sponsored by Mitsubishi Electrical Analysis Laboratories.

“I’m so touched and honored,” he says about getting the award. “I began my profession at Bell Labs, and James Flanagan was a legendary researcher in speech and audio there. Many individuals who’ve obtained this award have been my heroes within the discipline—who I look as much as. Their work has impressed me profoundly.”

An early fascination with how the human physique features

Rising up in Chennai, India, Narayanan wished to be a doctor as a result of he was fascinated with how the physique works. He utilized and was accepted into medical college on the age of 17, however his profession plans modified earlier than he even stepped right into a classroom.

Narayanan’s father was a chemist, and his uncle was {an electrical} engineer. After a number of discussions, his household persuaded him to modify to engineering even on the “supportive protest” of his uncle who was an engineer, he says.

“On the time, electrical engineering was touted as probably the most foundational discipline of science,” he says. “I didn’t know a lot about it, however it quickly grew to become clear to me that I might begin matching how sign processing programs work to conceptualize how the human physique features. That made me this type of engineer who may be very human-focused proper from the start. I have a look at folks from an engineering angle.”

He earned a bachelor’s diploma in EE in 1988 from the Faculty of Engineering, Guindy, (now a part of Anna College, in Chennai). Narayanan went on to earn his grasp’s and doctoral levels in EE in 1990 and 1995, from the College of California, Los Angeles.

He began his profession as a analysis scientist in 1995 at AT&T Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) in Murray Hill, N.J. Whereas engaged on speech and language processing applied sciences, he observed that the functions being developed have been just for wholesome adults, so he and different researchers determined to deal with ones for kids.

“Once we began engaged on applied sciences for kids, we instantly discovered basic challenges due to this dynamic trajectory of how their speech and language modifications,” he explains. “As kids are rising, they’re creating not solely bodily and physiologically but additionally socially.”

The researchers first needed to create a basis primarily based on speech science for the modifications to be studied objectively and quantitatively, he says.

“Speech and language consequence from a fancy orchestration of assorted processes that occur within the mind and the neural and motoric programs,” he says.

“My best pleasure is working with my college students in my lab and studying from them, greater than being a trainer or advisor. It’s wonderful that I get to be taught new issues day by day.”

To review the processes in a scientific means, the researchers used sensors and imaging to measure modifications in speech and language expertise. After amassing information within the type of indicators, the researchers utilized sign processing strategies to extract significant info.

Narayanan concluded that their technique could possibly be used for kids who’ve developmental situations corresponding to autism spectrum dysfunction, language delays, and comparable issues.

They invented behavioral sign processing (BSP) expertise, which analyzes and interprets speech and language in social conditions. Narayanan says the expertise is helpful for kids with autism who sometimes have a tough time with social interactions. The researchers additionally developed computational fashions to detect and interpret emotional cues from autistic kids’s speech and facial expressions.

One other device they created screens the progress of the communication skills of kids who aren’t creating language expertise on the anticipated age.

The researchers’ early work in understanding and decoding human feelings from speech has impressed options utilized in digital assistants corresponding to Alexa and Siri to sound extra pure and acknowledge a consumer’s feelings. BSP expertise helps the gadgets acknowledge not solely what customers say but additionally how they are saying it.

The researchers’ work in acoustic modeling, language modeling, and integrating contextual info enabled digital assistants to determine speech extra precisely.

Tech to enhance psychological well being

Narayanan left Bell Labs in 2000 to affix the USC college. He at all times wished to mentor college students and work with folks from totally different disciplines, he says, so when he was supplied a educating place in California—a spot he loves—he determined to present it a shot.

“My best pleasure is working with my college students in my lab and studying from them, greater than being a trainer or advisor,” he says. “It’s wonderful that I get to be taught new issues day by day.”

All through his almost 25 years at USC, Narayanan has continued to develop speech and language processing functions for well being care. He makes use of applied sciences corresponding to BSP to create strategies to higher perceive psychological well being.

“Bringing engineering instruments to help analysis into psychological well being has been an enormous space,” he says. “I’m very dedicated to that discipline.”

Diagnosing and treating psychological well being situations usually includes interacting with sufferers utilizing speech and language. In psychotherapy, for instance, a psychological well being skilled talks with the affected person to determine troubling ideas, feelings, and behaviors and to assist tackle them.

Psychotherapy analysis and medical follow have a tendency to make use of guide strategies to gather and consider efficiency and efficacy information, Narayanan says, however that’s not scalable and might result in inaccuracy. The solutions won’t truly replicate how the affected person feels, he says.

Narayanan and his colleagues invented a method to accumulate information by speech and language-based biomarkers to characterize remedy high quality and outcomes. Additionally they designed goal measures to detect and monitor an individual’s speech patterns for indicators of despair and anxiousness.

He at the moment is working with the U.S. Protection Superior Analysis Tasks Company to determine biomarkers for folks with suicidal ideation.

Narayanan holds 19 U.S. patents and has helped to discovered a number of startups to commercialize his applied sciences.

Overseeing USC’s grand analysis plans

In February he took on a brand new position that makes use of his multidisciplinary background: USC appointed him as vice chairman for its presidential initiatives, a newly created place. He coordinates and expands the attain of the college’s analysis initiatives in computing, well being, and sustainability, issues the college refers to as moon photographs. Notably the college has invested greater than US $1 billion in its Frontiers of Computing initiative.

“The college and its president have this massive strategic imaginative and prescient of fascinated with grand issues, like the way forward for well being, the way forward for computing, and sustainability of the planet,” Narayanan says. “They wished a researcher and a scholar who works throughout disciplines. They need me to attach folks and concepts to launch these massive initiatives which have a world footprint.”

“Advances are happening at an astonishing charge within the evolving fields encompassed by our moon photographs,” Carol Folt, the college’s president, stated in an announcement in regards to the appointment. “This position was created to focus not solely on implementing but additionally regularly broadening, amplifying, and weaving our moon photographs collectively so USC stays on the forefront of discovery and innovation. Professor Narayanan is the proper alternative for this position.”

IEEE: A giant household

On the encouragement of considered one of his undergraduate professors, Narayanan joined IEEE in his senior 12 months.

“I noticed IEEE is a house to be taught, to share, and to continually develop,” Narayanan says. “IEEE gives that for us. It’s a platform to situate your work in your discipline, and within the broader context of society and humanity. And, after all, you make loads of lifelong associates, and also you give again as a volunteer.”

And provides again he has. A member of the IEEE Pc and IEEE Sign Processing societies, he was the latter’s first vice chairman of training.

He has been on the editorial boards of each societies’ publications and has served as editor in chief for his or her journals and transactions. He additionally held management roles in organizing the societies’ conferences and workshops.

Each societies have acknowledged him for his work. He obtained an IEEE Pc Society McCluskey Technical Achievement Award this 12 months and an IEEE Sign Processing Society Shannon-Nyquist Technical Achievement Award final 12 months.

Volunteering has change into a part of his life, he says, and through the years, he has inspired his college students to affix.

“A lot of them are actually professors all over the world, they usually encourage their college students to affix,” he says. “IEEE is sort of a massive household.”