The Meet a Data Scientist series is a chance to get up close and personal with top-level data science professionals. Join us for a talk with Dr. Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan, an interdisciplinary engineer-scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core.

The purpose of the Meet a Data Scientist lecture series is to introduce our audience to the people behind the data, their lives, interests, career choices, their work, and passion for how they can use data to solve grand challenges in their respective fields. Join us as we peer behind the curtain and meet the data scientists behind the data! This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and is free and open to the public.

Register Now  |  Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, 4:00-5:00 PM

TALK TITLE:  “Human-Centered Multimodal Machine Intelligence”

The convergence of sensing, communication, and computing technologies offers tremendous opportunities for continuous information-rich yet unobtrusive multimodal, spatiotemporal characterization of an individual’s behavior and state, and of the environment within which they operate. This in turn is enabling hitherto unimagined possibilities for understanding and supporting various aspects of human-centered applications from health and well-being to job performance.

Recent computational approaches that have leveraged judicious use of both data and knowledge have yielded significant advances in this regard, for example in deriving rich, context-aware information from multimodal signal sources including human speech, language, and videos of behavior. This talk will focus on some of the advances, opportunities, and challenges in gathering such data and creating algorithms for machine processing of such cues. It will highlight some of our ongoing efforts in Behavioral Signal Processing (BSP)—technology and algorithms for quantitatively and objectively understanding typical, atypical, and distressed human behavior—with a specific focus on communicative, affective, and social behavior. The talk will illustrate behavioral machine intelligence applications that contribute to quantifying higher-level, often subjectively described, human behavior in a domain-sensitive fashion. Examples will be drawn from health and wellbeing realms such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, Couples Therapy, Depression, Suicidality, Addiction Counseling, and Workplace Behavior. It will also highlight some of the open technical challenges.

About Shri

Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan is University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is also a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery, Director of the Ming Hsieh Institute, and Research Director of the Information Sciences Institute. Prior to USC he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His research focuses on human-centered information processing and communication technologies.

Shri is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, ISCA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is a recipient of several honors including the 2015 Engineers Council’s Distinguished Educator Award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, the 2005 and 2009 Best Journal Paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (serving as Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-11), a 2018 ISCA CSL Best Journal Paper award, ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for ASHA in 2017, the Ten Year Technical Impact Award in 2014, and the Sustained Accomplishment Award in 2020 from ACM ICMI. He has published over 900 papers and has been granted eighteen U.S. patents. His research and inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on the telecommunication services and AI-based conversational assistance industry and Lyssn focused on mental health care delivery, treatment, and quality assurance.