Welcome to the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL).  

SAIL conducts fundamental and applied research in human-centered information processing. Our emphasis is on speech, audio, language, biomedical and multi-modal signal processing, machine learning and pattern recognition.

SAIL's research applications and systems development especially focus on domains with direct societal relevance including in human health and well being (both basic and translational research such as in the domains of autism, pediatric obesity and disordered speech production), education (technologies for literacy and language learning) and defense (signal and pattern classification, speech recognition and translation, virtual human-based systems and audio-visual scene analysis).

SAIL supports a collaborative interdisciplinary environment and bridges research from several departments and schools both within and outside USC.

SAIL was established in November 2000 by Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, who is also the director of SAIL. Our research is supported by the NSF, NIH, DARPA, Army, ONR, and grants from foundations and industry.

Research Sub-Groups:

• SpeechLinks
  • Speech to speech translation
  • Spoken dialog interactions and interfaces
  • Mathematical modeling of human-machine and machine mediated human-human interactions
  • Automatic speech recognition in multiple languages
  • Noise robust speech processing and acoustic modeling
  • Text and multilingual data mining
• Emotions Group
  • Emotions in audio, speech, text and visual data
  • Expressive speech synthesis
• Social Signal Processing Group
  • Technology-based assessment of language learning skills
  • Robotics and speech processing technology for autistic children
  • Creative technologies with applications in theater
• SPAN (Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge) Group
  • Speech production research
• Biomedical Signal Processing Group
  • Body sensing, processing and modeling methods in metabolic health monitoring for pediatric obesity applications
• Multimedia Signal Processing Group
  • Content and style-based mining of audio/music, text and video
  • Unstructured audio processing and scene analysis
  • Smart room-multi-channel, multi-modal data acquisition and processing
  • Query by humming systems
  • Wired/wireless immersive collaboration systems