Kicking off year two, the initial spring 2022 Meet a Data Scientist series lecture (held on Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, 4:00-5:00 PM) featured USC Professor, Dr. Shri Narayanan, introduced by Dr. Daniel Messinger: “It’s a pleasure to welcome you all to our Meet a Data Scientist lecture series. The purpose of the series is to introduce folks who are actually doing day-to-day data science.”

Dr. Narayanan began by saying that he hoped his chosen topic would be of interest to interdisciplinary data scientists, especially those focused on data from people, about people, and for people. The whole area of machine intelligence and related terms—artificial intelligence, machine learning, data sciences—he explained, has seen a resurgence of interest and excitement across various fields. Not only for people interested in people, and in learning about the fundamental scientific aspects of things like cognition, affect, and behavior in general, but also, those trying to develop technologies that can support people. “These are very exciting times,” he remarked.

The promise and possibilities, Dr. Narayanan observed, are happening in converging advances on:

• The technology front, across the ecosystem: the ability to gather data, such as sensing using devices on people/with people, and sensing by people using all kinds of human computing—crowdsourcing, for example.
• Advances in computing: the ability to process data in the cloud, but, also increasingly in the edge on devices that have become amazing computing elements that can do all kinds of things, both sensing and processing.
• Machine learning algorithm advances have been able to process and make sense of the data, and to share the data, with wired/wireless technologies, plus, connecting back to their applications, mainly people.
• Happening alongside these advances, Dr. Narayanan noted, the whole domain of scholarship in cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary partnerships are no longer a fringe thing, but team science has become a central aspect of much of what people do not only in academia, but also in industry, and across the board.
• And importantly, resource sharing—sharing data, sharing tools, by people across domains and expertise areas—is now even codified by national agencies (like NIH) and journals that support, not only writing about your ideas, but then sharing a github link to your tools or data for reproducibility.

All of this, he said, is allowing us to think about new ways of advancing both the basic science and the applications to lay humans. Against this backdrop of sharing resources, Dr. Narayanan delved into how his lab has focused on novel possibilities to help understand, support and enhance the human experience.

TALK TITLE:  “Human-Centered Multimodal Machine Intelligence”  |  Download Powerpoint Presentation