USC professor’s tech has improved autism analysis

Because of 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 at the moment are extra intuitive, and so they can higher perceive and reply to a consumer’s instructions.

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

Narayanan is a professor {of electrical} engineering, laptop 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 inside 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 subject—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 needed to be a doctor as a result of he was fascinated with how the physique works. He utilized and was accepted into medical faculty 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 subject of science,” he says. “I didn’t know a lot about it, but it surely quickly turned clear to me that I may begin matching how sign processing methods work to conceptualize how the human physique features. That made me this kind of engineer who may be very human-focused proper from the start. I have a look at individuals from an engineering angle.”

He earned a bachelor’s diploma in EE in 1988 from the School 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 seen that the purposes being developed have been just for wholesome adults, so he and different researchers determined to concentrate on ones for youngsters.

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

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

“Speech and language end result from a posh orchestration of varied processes that occur within the mind and the neural and motoric methods,” he says.

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

To check the processes in a scientific method, the researchers used sensors and imaging to measure adjustments in speech and language expertise. After accumulating knowledge within the type of indicators, the researchers utilized sign processing strategies to extract significant info.

Narayanan concluded that their technique may very well be used for youngsters who’ve developmental situations resembling autism spectrum dysfunction, language delays, and comparable issues.

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

One other device they created displays the progress of the communication talents of youngsters who usually are not 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 resembling Alexa and Siri to sound extra pure and acknowledge a consumer’s feelings. BSP know-how helps the gadgets acknowledge not solely what customers say but in addition 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 all the time needed to mentor college students and work with individuals from totally different disciplines, he says, so when he was supplied a instructing place in California—a spot he loves—he determined to offer it a shot.

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

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

“Bringing engineering instruments to assist analysis into psychological well being has been a giant space,” he says. “I’m very dedicated to that subject.”

Diagnosing and treating psychological well being situations usually entails 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 deal with them.

Psychotherapy analysis and scientific apply have a tendency to make use of handbook strategies to gather and consider efficiency and efficacy knowledge, Narayanan says, however that isn’t scalable and might result in inaccuracy. The solutions won’t really replicate how the affected person feels, he says.

Narayanan and his colleagues invented a strategy to gather knowledge 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 present is working with the U.S. Protection Superior Analysis Initiatives Company to determine biomarkers for individuals 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 pictures. 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 by grand issues, like the way forward for well being, the way forward for computing, and sustainability of the planet,” Narayanan says. “They needed a researcher and a scholar who works throughout disciplines. They need me to attach individuals and concepts to launch these massive initiatives which have a world footprint.”

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

IEEE: A giant household

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

“I noticed IEEE is a house to study, to share, and to always develop,” Narayanan says. “IEEE supplies that for us. It’s a platform to situate your work in your subject, and within the broader context of society and humanity. And, in fact, you make plenty of lifelong associates, and also you give again as a volunteer.”

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

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 Laptop Society McCluskey Technical Achievement Award this 12 months and an IEEE Sign Processing Society Shannon-Nyquist Technical Achievement Award final 12 months.

Volunteering has develop into a part of his life, he says, and over time, he has inspired his college students to affix.

“Lots of them at the moment are professors all over the world, and so they encourage their college students to affix,” he says. “IEEE is sort of a massive household.”