Upper Airway MRI Image Processing

Shrikanth Narayanan is the Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. He also holds an appointment as professor of computer science, linguistics, and psychology in the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. His research focuses on signals and systems modeling and has an interdisciplinary emphasis on speech, audio, language, and multimodal and biomedical problems and applications.

Narayanan is director of the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), which he founded in 2000 as part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Integrated Media Systems Center and its Signal Processing Institute. The SAIL research group is devoted to theoretical issues and practical applications of speech and language processing, speech production modeling, biomedical signal processing and modeling, and human-machine interaction.

As part of SAIL's goal to help develop machines capable of understanding human needs, Narayanan and his research team created an application that allows automated telephone answering machines to determine when a caller is frustrated and then transfer the caller to a person. They have also produced SpeechLinks, a computer-mediated speech translation system that allows two-way communication between people who do not speak the same language. For example, the device can translate the speech of an English-speaking doctor for a Spanish-speaking patient, as well as translate the patient's Spanish into English for the doctor. These translation systems have numerous business and consumer applications and are capable of translating other languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Malay. Narayanan and his team have used HPCC resources to develop speech and language models in multiple languages and process magnetic resonance images of the upper airway tract.

Narayanan's laboratory is supported by federal and industry grants, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research, the United States Army, and the Department of Homeland Security. He has published over 300 papers, holds 7 U.S. patents, has 10 pending U.S. patents, and has received the National Science Foundation's Early Career Development Award.