Shrikanth Narayanan

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is a University Professor and holder of the Niki and Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), serving as the inaugural Vice President for Presidential Initiatives. He leads the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) and holds joint appointments in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. His research focuses on speech and audio processing, behavioral signal processing, and real-time MRI of speech production, with applications in healthcare, education, and technology.

Education: B.E. in Electrical Engineering from College of Engineering, Guindy (Chennai, India, 1988); M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA (1990, 1992, 1995).

Research interests span computational linguistics, machine learning, and multimodal human behavior analysis. He pioneered technologies for speech biomarkers in mental health, real-time MRI of speech production, and wearable sensor systems for longitudinal health studies.

His work in speech emotion recognition, forensic interviews, and clinical applications has been recognized through over 40 awards, including the IEEE Flanagan Award and ISCA Medal. He has published extensively in journals like Proceedings of the IEEE, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and PLOS One.

• Key Grants: NSF CAREER, Okawa Research, IBM Faculty, Google/Amazon awards.
• Labs/Teams: Signal Analysis & Interpretation Lab (SAIL), USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Google Visiting Faculty Researcher.