USC professor’s tech has improved autism diagnosis

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 deciphering human feelings from speech. The assistants at the moment are extra intuitive, and so they can higher perceive and reply to a person’s instructions.

It’s additionally simpler now to study a brand new language due to instruments he developed that present suggestions on how one can pronounce phrases.

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

Narayanan acquired 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 Electric Research 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 acquired 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 capabilities

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 methods work to conceptualize how the human physique capabilities. That made me this form of engineer who may be very human-focused proper from the start. I take a look at individuals 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 University, in Chennai). Narayanan went on to earn his grasp’s and doctoral levels in EE in 1990 and 1995, from the University 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 had 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 elementary 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 in addition 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 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 every single day.”

To check the processes in a scientific approach, the researchers used sensors and imaging to measure modifications in speech and language abilities. After gathering information within the type of indicators, the researchers utilized sign processing strategies to extract significant data.

Narayanan concluded that their methodology may very well be used for kids who’ve developmental situations similar 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 beneficial 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 youngsters who usually are not creating language abilities on the anticipated age.

The researchers’ early work in understanding and deciphering human feelings from speech has impressed options utilized in digital assistants similar to Alexa and Siri to sound extra pure and acknowledge a person’s feelings. BSP expertise 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 data enabled digital assistants to determine speech extra precisely.

Tech to enhance psychological well being

Narayanan left Bell Labs in 2000 to hitch the USC college. He all the time wished to mentor college students and work with individuals from completely different disciplines, he says, so when he was provided a educating place in California—a spot he loves—he determined to provide 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 every single 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 similar to BSP to create strategies to raised perceive psychological well being.

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

Diagnosing and treating psychological well being situations typically 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 handbook strategies to gather and consider efficiency and efficacy information, Narayanan says, however that isn’t scalable and might result in inaccuracy. The solutions won’t truly mirror how the affected person feels, he says.

Narayanan and his colleagues invented a solution to gather 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 present is working with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 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 function that makes use of his multidisciplinary background: USC appointed him as vp 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 large strategic imaginative and prescient of enthusiastic about 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 individuals and concepts to launch these large initiatives which have a worldwide footprint.”

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

IEEE: A giant household

On the encouragement of one in all his undergraduate professors, Narayanan joined IEEE in his senior yr.

“I spotted IEEE is a house to study, to share, and to continuously develop,” Narayanan says. “IEEE offers that for us. It’s a platform to situate your work in your discipline, and within the broader context of society and humanity. And, in fact, you make quite a lot of lifelong mates, and also you give again as a volunteer.”

And provides again he has. A member of the IEEE Computer and IEEE Signal Processing societies, he was the latter’s first vp 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 acquired an IEEE Computer Society McCluskey Technical Achievement Award this yr and an IEEE Signal Processing Society Shannon-Nyquist Technical Achievement Award final yr.

Volunteering has turn out to be a part of his life, he says, and over time, he has inspired his college students to hitch.

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