USC professor’s tech has improved autism diagnosis

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 are actually extra intuitive, and so they can higher perceive and reply to a person’s instructions.

It’s additionally simpler now to be taught a brand new language due to 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 University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. He additionally heads USC’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory and holds a number of different educational positions throughout the college. He’s a visiting school 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 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 obtained this award have been my heroes within the area—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 area of science,” he says. “I didn’t know a lot about it, nevertheless it quickly grew to become clear to me that I may begin matching how sign processing techniques work to conceptualize how the human physique features. That made me this form 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 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 functions being developed had been just for wholesome adults, so he and different researchers determined to give attention to 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 youngsters are rising, they’re growing not solely bodily and physiologically but additionally socially.”

The researchers first needed to create a basis based mostly on speech science for the modifications 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 techniques,” 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 superb that I get to be taught new issues daily.”

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

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

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 troublesome 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 should not growing 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 comparable 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 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 hitch the USC school. He at all times wished to mentor college students and work with individuals 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 instructor or advisor,” he says. “It’s superb that I get to be taught new issues daily.”

All through his practically 25 years at USC, Narayanan has continued to develop speech and language processing functions for well being care. He makes use of applied sciences comparable to 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 area.”

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 observe have a tendency to make use of guide strategies to gather and consider efficiency and efficacy knowledge, Narayanan says, however that isn’t scalable and may result in inaccuracy. The solutions may not truly replicate how the affected person feels, he says.

Narayanan and his colleagues invented a strategy to accumulate 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 presently 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 photographs. 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 excited 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 going down at an astonishing fee within the evolving fields encompassed by our moon photographs,” Carol Folt, the college’s president, mentioned in an announcement in regards to the appointment. “This function was created to focus not solely on implementing but additionally frequently broadening, amplifying, and weaving our moon photographs collectively so USC stays on the forefront of discovery and innovation. Professor Narayanan is the proper selection for this function.”

IEEE: An enormous household

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

“I noticed IEEE is a house to be taught, to share, and to always develop,” Narayanan says. “IEEE offers that for us. It’s a platform to situate your work in your area, and within the broader context of society and humanity. And, after all, you make lots of lifelong associates, 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 obtained 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 change into a part of his life, he says, and through the years, he has inspired his college students to hitch.

“A lot of them are actually professors world wide, and so they encourage their college students to hitch,” he says. “IEEE is sort of a large household.”