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May 2020

  • Lynssn, Inc a mental health care startup co-founded by @USC_SAIL Shri Narayanan was featured in Geekwire

October 2020

  • Shri awarded the distinction of University Professor.

    • March 2020

    • SAIL's language processing technolgies reported in the article describing new software aimed at supporting diversity and inclusion in Backstage

    February 2020

    January 2020

    November 2019

    September 2019

    • MICA's work, which studies representations in children's television, was featured in the Washington Post.
    • The documentary “This Changes Everything” on gender in media officially launched in L.A. and New York August 9/19. Includes Shri Narayanan and USC SAIL's work on computational media intelligence for diversity and inclusion.

    August 2019

    June 2019

    April 2019

    • SAIL’s work on computational media intelligence from movie scripts featured in the LA Times.

    March 2019

    • SAIL’s work led by Victor Martinez on using Artificial Intelligence to predict violence in movies featured in Viterbi news.

    January 2019

    • PCMagazine reports collaborative research by SAIL led by Shri Narayanan and USC Law Professor Tom Lyon and his team: Can AI Train Forensic Interviewers to Unlock Trauma?
    • Shrikanth Narayanan and Theodora Chaspari collaborated to study how your voice hides clues about your love life, which was featured by the BBC.

    December 2018

    • ITU trialing software to track progress on gender parity at events In partnership wih United Nations/ITU, audio processing technologies developed at SAIL were used to measure progress towards gender equality targets at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018.

      • December 2018

      November 2018

      October 2018

      • SAIL Team with Karel Mundnich, Brandon Booth and Shrikanth Narayanan won the 2018 AVEC gold-standard sub-challenge.

      September 2018

      • ISCA Best Journal Paper awarded at Interspeech 2018 for SAIL’s paper on “Automatic speaker age and gender recognition using acoustic and prosodic level information fusion” published in Computer Speech and Language 2013 by Ming Li, Kyu Han and Shrikanth Narayanan.

      July 2018

      • SAIL’s collaborative work with architecture on smart buildings featured in USC News.

      December 2017

      • MICA team's work on representations in the Star Wars movies over time was featured in:

      October 2017

      August 2017

      September 2016

      July 2016

      • A paper led by SAIL’s Danny Bone of its CARE group on the use of machine learning in Autism research was featured in a news article. (Read more)
      • SAIL’s research, which focuses on developing software that can detect therapist empathy as a tool for training, was featured in Social Work Today. (Read more)

      June 2016

      • Research by Shrikanth Narayanan and colleagues finding that a computer algorithm programmed to predict whether a couple was likely to break up was mentioned in Business Insider. (Read more)

      April 2016

      • Shri Narayanan given the “Use Inspired Research Award” at the 2016 Faculty and Staff Awards Luncheon. (Read more)

      March 2016

      • SAIL student Zhaojun Yang wins a Best Paper Award at ICASSP 2016 for her paper.

      December 2015

      November 2015

      September 2015

      • Team SAIL wins Interspeech Computational Paralinguistics challenge for the record sixth time. (Read more)

      July 2015

      • SAIL’s research on the science of beatboxing in the news. (Read more)

      March 2015

      • USC Viterbi Professor Shrikanth Narayanan’s interdisciplinary research could improve therapist-patient relationships. (Read more)

      December 2014

      • SAIL team wins ACM-ICMI Ten Year Technical Impact for a paper on multimodal emotion recognition originally published in 2004 by Busso et al. at ICMI. (Read more)
      • An article on Voiceprints profiles Shri Narayanan and SAIL. (Read more)

      October 2014

      • SAIL Wins the 2014 Interspeech Challenge again! (Read more)

      June 2014

      • The SAIL family is deeply saddened about the unexpected and untimely loss of one of its dear members, Mary Francis on June 22, 2014. Mary was SAIL’s illustrious administrator and much beloved by all SAILers past and present.

      May 2014

      • Shri Narayanan is interviewed by WNYW Fox 5 News in New York about SAIL’s work on Beatboxing.

      April 2014

      • SAIL’s SPAN groups’ work on Beatboxing was features in Slate Magazine. (Read More…)

      March 2014

      • SAIL’s work on media content analysis led by Professor Shrikanth Narayanan in collaboration with Geena Davis Institute was mentioned in the New York Times. It is focused on quantifying screen representations of female characters in movies.
      • SAIL Doctoral students Vikram Ramanarayanan, Jangwon Kim and Naveen Kumar are winners of the Northern Digital Inc. Excellence Awards for their papers in the 10th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP) in Cologne, the premier meeting in speech production and speech science. Vikram Ramanarayanan, for a paper with Louis Goldstein and Shrikanth Narayanan, entitled “Speech motor control primitives arising from a dynamical systems model of vocal tract articulation” Jangwon Kim and Naveen Kumar, for a paper with Sungbok Lee and Shrikanth Narayanan, entitled “Enhanced airway-tissue boundary segmentation for real-time magnetic resonance imaging data”. The awards recognize the best papers at the International Seminar on Speech Production, “an interdisciplinary forum for researchers working on all aspects of speech production from fields as diverse as phonology, phonetics, prosody, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neuroscience, computer science and human interaction.” (Read More…)

      September 2013

      October 2013

      • SAILers win Interspeech Challenge for a record fourth time. A SAIL team led by Rahul Gupta and Kartik Audhkhasi won the Interspeech 2013 Paralinguistics Challenge on detecting social signals. Read more…
      • Best Paper Award at Interspeech 2013. Coliz Vaz and Vikram Ramanarayanan win a best paper award at Interspeech 2013 for their work on noisy audio enhancement. Read more…

      August 2013

      May 2013

      February 2013

      January 2013

      November 2012

      • SAIL’s behavioral signal processing work on Autism was highlighted in the USC Viterbi news. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)
      • SAIL’s work on behavioral signal processing and its implication for studying post traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) was reported in a news article entitled “Healing Wounds, Visible and Invisible”. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      October 2012

      September 2012

      • SAILers win Interspeech 2012 Speaker Trait Challenge! This was for the pathology challenge. The team was led by Ph.D. students Jangwon Kim and Naveen Kumar and included Ph.D. students Andreas Tsiartas and Ming Li. This is a third such award for SAIL, teams from USC SAIL were winners of Interspeech challenge awards in 2009 and 2011. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      March 2012

      January 2012

      • KPCC, a National Public Radio affiliate, visited SAIL for a feature on a Behavioral Signal Processing topic in its “Off-Ramp” show. (Read more in USC Viterbi News)

      December 2011

      November 2011

      • Shri Narayanan receives the 2011 Alumni Professional Achievement Award from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. (Read more in USC EE news)
      • Shri Narayanan on behalf of the Ming Hsieh Institute hosted a reception for EE Alumni in the Bay Area which included former SAILers. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      October 2011

      • SAIL team led by Danny Bone wins 2011 Interspeech Speaker State Challenge (Intoxication subchallenge). (Read more in USC Viterbi news and USC news)
      • Simons Foundation highlights the role of technology in supporting Autism research in the context of the NSF-supported collaborative “expeditions in computing” where SAIL is a key partner. (Read more in Simons Foundation news)
      • USC Viterbi News features SAIL’s work on Behavioral Signal Processing and Behavioral Informatics based on a keynote lecture by Shri Narayanan at ICME2011. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      September 2010

      August 2010

      • SAIL’s Human Behavior Modeling Work on BBC News.

      January 2010

      • SAIL to receive an IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award to be given at ICASSP 2010 in Dallas, TX for the paper by Chul Min Lee & Shri Narayanan, “Toward detecting emotions in spoken dialogs” published in IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Processing, 2005. This is SAIL’s second IEEE SPS Best Paper Award.

      October 2009

      • SAIL member Selina Chu was invited to attend the IBM Watson “Emerging leaders in Multimedia” Workshop through a competitive selection process. She presented her work on “Recognition and Characterization of Unstructured Environmental Audio”. This was held on October 8 and 9, 2009 at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY to recognize outstanding student researchers in the field of multimedia. She was joined by 9 other students from leading research groups in institutions around the country.

      September 2009

      • SAIL was awarded a $2.2M NSF grant to advance speech translation research.
      • SAIL was awarded a 4-year $2.2M NSF grant to advance context enriched speech translation research. The specific application focus is on cross language interactions in health care settings.
      • USC computer scientists, communication specialists and health professionals hope to create a cheap, robust and effective speech-to-speech translation system for clinics, emergency rooms and ambulances.(Read more in USC news)
      • A million-dollar grant awarded to a team of USC researchers could make communication with doctors across language barriers a lot easier, thanks to a new advanced translation system. (Read more in the Daily Trojan)
      • Members from SAIL’s emotions research group led by Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee have the won the “INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge Award”, under the classifier challenge category for their paper entitled, Chi-Chun (Jeremy) Lee, Emily Mower, Carlos Busso, Sungbok Lee and Shrikanth S. Narayanan, “Emotion recognition using a hierarchical binary decision tree approach.”
      • A team of USC researchers from the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), directed by Professor Shri Narayanan, the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), and the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering won the Interspeech 2009 Emotion Challenge Award. (Read more in USC EE news)

      June 2009

      • SAIL members Ming Li, Viktor Rozgic and Shri Narayanan part of the KNOWME body sensing networks team that won a Best Paper award at IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS 2009), with the paper entitled: Gautam Thatte, Viktor Rozgic, Ming Li, Sabyasachi Ghosh, Urbashi Mitra, Shri Narayanan, Murali Annavaram, Donna Spruijt-Metz. “Optimal Allocation of Time-Resources for Multihypothesis Activity-Level Detection.”

      May 2009

      • Jorge Silva wins the Best Viterbi Thesis Award under the theoretical work category for his 2008 PhD dissertation entitled “On Optimal Signal Representation for Statistical Learning and Pattern Recognition.” Jorge is presently a faculty member in the EE department at the University of Chile, Santiago.

      April 2009

      • Prasanta Ghosh wins a Best Teaching Assistant Award from the EE Department for a second time in a row.
      • Andreas Tsiartas also wins a Best Teaching Assistant Award from the EE Department.

      March 2009

      • Erik Bresch was awarded the USC Phi Kappa Phi Student Research Award.
      • Matt Black was awarded the Simon Ramo Fellowship for 2009-2010.
      • Angeliki Metallinou was awarded the Myronis Endowed Fellowship for 2009-2010.

      January 2009

      • Three faculty members from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering — Shri Narayanan, Timothy Pinkston and USC President Steven B. Sample — were recently elected Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellows. (Read more in USC Viterbi news and USC news)

      August 2008

      • Shri Wins the IBM Faculty Award. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)
      • Two Viterbi School engineering faculty — Shri Narayanan of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and Laurent Itti of the Computer Science Department — have won 2008 Okawa Foundation research grants to support their research in human-machine speech processing and neuroscience-inspired robotic vision systems, respectively. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      Summer 2008

      • From USC College of Letters, Arts, & Sciences News, May, 2008: “In 2005 and 2006 the National Institutes of Health awarded two grants totaling over $4.5 million to support the research of Dani Byrd, professor of linguistics, and Shri Narayanan, Andrew J. Viterbi Professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, who has joint appointments in linguistics, psychology and computer science.”
      • Seven SAILers Graduate!
      • Congrats to: Jorge Silva, Chuping Liu, Carlos Busso, Erdem Unal, Vivek Rangarajan, Shankar Ananthakrishnan, Shiva Sundaram
      • Abe Kazemzadeh is spending the summer of 2008 interning at AT&T Research.
      • Ozlem Kalinli is spending the summer of 2008 interning at Microsoft Research.
      • SAIL hosts Summer Interns (Summer 2008 – Fall 2008)
        • Matthew Tan, Undergraduate, UC-Berkeley
        • Isaac Rottman, Undergraduate, Northwestern
        • Jorge Gilabert, Undergraduate, UPC – Barcelona
        • Dustin Li, PhD student Georgia Tech (DHS Fellowship)
        • Carlos Molina, PhD student, University of Chile (CONICYT Fellowship)
      • Prasanta Ghosh was awarded Best TA for the Department of Electrical Engineering.
      • Emily Mower was awarded the Intel Fellowship.

      October 2007

      • From USC Viterbi School of Engineering News, October 30, 2007: “Thirteen USC engineers with full or joint appointments in the Viterbi School of Engineering have been awarded 2007 Zumberge interdisciplinary research grants by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Advancement”
      • JongHo Shin has been awarded best student paper at IEEE MMSP 2007 for the paper:
        Jong Ho Shin, Panayiotis Georgiou, and Shrikanth Narayanan. Analyzing the multimodal behaviors of users of a speech-to-speech translation device by using concept matching scores. In Proceedings of IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, Chania, Greece, October 2007.

      Summer 2007

      • Matt Black is spending the summer at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, doing research under Gerasimos Potamianos on acoustic event detection. They are working with the CHIL corpus, consisting of multiple channels of far-field audio recordings from multi-person meeting scenarios. Their goal is to detect specific non-speech acoustic events (door knocks, paper noises, applause, etc.), the majority of which are temporally overlapped with speech and/or other unknown acoustic events. The research has numerous applications, from improved speaker segmentation in smart rooms, to environment sensing in an elderly person’s house.
      • SAIL student Joseph Tepperman is spending the summer of 2007 doing an internship with Rosetta Stone Labs in Boulder, Colorado. Under the supervision of Bryan Pellom and Kadri Hacioglu (developers of the SONIC speech recognizer), his summer research is in automatic pronunciation evaluation for the world’s #1 language-learning software.
      • Emil Ettelaie is spending the summer of 2007 interning at AT&T Research.
      • Carlos Busso was awarded with a Graduate School Fellowship in Digital Scholarship for the academic year 2007-2008. Graduate School Fellowships in Digital Scholarship are designed to foster innovative multimedia research that expands the potential of academic publication via emergent and transitional media.
      • Emily Mower was awarded the Herbert Kunzel Engineering Fellowship for the academic year 2007-2008.

      October 2006

      • Shiva Sundaram and Shrikanth Narayanan receive “Best Student Paper” award from 2006 IEEE MMSP (Multimedia Signal Processing). (Read more in USC Viterbi news)
      • Joe Tepperman’s second speech recognition art installation for Long Beach’s annual Soundwalk event. This year’s piece, entitled “Say Please”, was a collaboration with musician Laura Steenberge. It consisted of a comically argumentative hat rack that would respond in collage to recognized speech.

      February 2006

      December 2005

      • From USC Viterbi Engineer, Fall/Winter 2005, Volume 4, Issue 1, page 9: “Shrikanth Narayan has set remarkable goals – and made remarkable progress in realizing them…”
      • From namak, Fall/Winter 2005, page 39: “At the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering, an interdisciplinary team…”
      • From USC Chronicle, December 5, Volume 25, Number 13, page 2: “Shrikanth Narayan has been elected a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America…”
      • From USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, Volume 6, Number 2 page 30: “The U.S. office of Naval Research awarded a five-year, $5-million multidisciplinary rant…”

      November 2005

      October 2005

      • Fox TV. From Fox 5 News (nationally televised), October 18: Also, in November and December SAIL was featured in CNN, KCAL/KCBS.

      August 2005

      • From Daily Trojan, August 17, 2005: “Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a two-way voice translation system that…”
      • SAIL student Joe Tepperman and Professor Shri Narayanan have collaborated with Long Beach-based artists/linguists Ron Saunders and Mackenzie Bristow for a piece to be debuted at Long Beach’s 2nd Annual Soundwalk, “an evening of indoor and outdoor site-specific sound installations.” Entitled the Silent Project, the piece is conceptually rooted in Caleb Gattegno’s color-based Silent Method of second language acquisition, and incorporates interactive speech recognition technology into visual art. Soundwalk is on Saturday, August 20th from 5-10 pm, in Downtown Long Beach’s East Village Arts District.
      • From SciTech, August 15, 2005: “Engineers at the University of Southern California are perfecting translation technology designed to…”

      July 2005

      • From CNN Paula Zahn Now: “Aired July 27, 2005 – 20:00 ET”. (Link)
      • From Persian Journal, July 25, 2005: “Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created…”
      • From KCET Life & Times, July 20, 2005: “While the need for medical interpreters is obvious, researchers here at USC are taking medical translation…”
      • From Ventura County Star, July 11, 2005: “Doctors in the immediate future could be able to carry on conversations with their patients, even if…”

      June 2005

      • From Clinical Window Journal, June 30, 2005: “Three years of work by a large interdisciplinary team at the University of Southern California has created a rudimentary but working two-way voice translation system…”
      • An interdisciplinary team led by Shri Narayanan has created a rudimentary system to translate spoken English to spoken Persian, and vice versa, allowing doctors and patients to communicate. The system could be used in two years. (Read more in USC Viterbi news)

      May 2005

      • From KPCC, May 26, 2005: “Everyone knows the frustration of trying to communicate with a company that refuses to put a live person on the phone…”
      • The Office of Naval Research has awarded its 5-year 5 million dollar Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant to a collaboration among USC (Shri Narayanan [EE] & Dani Byrd [LAS]), Stanford (D. Jurafsky, C. Manning), and University of Washington (J. Bilmes, K. Kirchoff) for a project entitled “Human-like Speech Processing”, in response to its call for “radically new approaches to speech-to-text conversion.” This was the only award made for this announced MURI topic. The project will last May 2005-April 2010.
      • New Grant from NIH to study speech production.
      • The National Institutes of Health NIDCD has awarded Shri Narayanan (PI) (EE, Ling, CS).
      • 2005 Northrop-Grumman High Visibility Research Award to Shri Narayanan. The USC Electrical Engineering Department gave its first Northrop-Grumman High Visibility Research Award to Shri Narayanan on May 5, 2005 during a departmental ceremony.
      • The paper presented by Shankar at the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) has been selected as a best student paper in the speech and audio processing area: ‘An Automatic Prosody Recognizer using a Coupled Multi-Stream Acoustic Model and a Syntactic-Prosodic Language Model’ , Sankaranarayanan Ananthakrishnan, Shrikanth Narayanan, University of Southern California.

      February 2005

      • BBC 4, BBC World and BBC Go Digital. (Link)

      January 2005

      • From IMSC News, page 5: “IMSC key investigator Prof. Shri Narayanan and his team are developing a novel language tranlsation system…”

      December 2004

      • Laughter Synthesis worked on National Academy of Engineering Radio(WTOP)…

      November 2004

      • From Stretch, November 2004: “Today’s technology gives businesses a way out of having to answer the phone. It is rare to ever get a real person…”
      • From IMSC News: “Prof. Shri Narayanan likes to leave them laughing. He and Shiva Sundaram, a PhD student in electrical engineering…”

      October 2004

      • From IEEE Intelligent Systems, September/October 2004, pages 4-7: “For many people, learning a language means years of classes and hours of audiotapes…”

      September 2004

      • From USC Trojan Family Magazine, Volume 36, Number 3, pages 38-45: “We tend to think of Universities as intellectual power plants in which professors…”

      July 2004

      • From IMSC News, page 2: “Using MRI, Prof. Shri Narayanan and a team of interdisciplinary collaborators have created real-time movies of speech production…”

      June 2004

      • From Texas Innovator, June 2004: “There is a new weapon in the battle against automated and telemarketing phone calls.” (Read more in Texas Innovator)

      May 2004

      • From Advance Online Editions for Speech-Language Pathologists & Audiologists: “A team of researchers at USC has applied cutting-edge imaging tools to the study of human speech.” (Read more)
      • From USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, Volume 5, Number 2, page 14: “A team of USC researchers has brought cutting-edge imaging tools to the study of human speech.”
      • From USC Engineer, Volume 2, Issue 2, page 6: “Shrikanth Narayanan, a computer scientist and linguist working in the Integrated Media Systems Center.”
      • From USC Engineer, Volume 2, Issue 2, page 15: “Do you get frustrated trying to navigate through annoying automated phone answering systems.”
      • From Economic Development Futures Web Journal, May 20, 2004: “Tired of being left on hold? New software will gauge which callers are pissed off by listening.”
      • From Newsweek magazine, May 17 Issue: “Press 3 if you feel like using the F word. We’re not there yet, but…”

      April 2004

      • Tired of being left on hold? New software will gauge which callers are pissed off by listening. (Read more)
      • A team of USC researchers has brought cutting-edge imaging tools to the study of human speech. (Read more in news-medical.net)
      • From Daily Trojan, April 7, 2004: “Recently, Shrikanth Narayanan, director of the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab, created a new feature…”

      March 2004

      • From USC Chronicle, Volume 23, Number 23, page 2: “On Feb. 10, WIRED reported on a new software program developed by engineer Shrikanth Narayanan that…”
      • From Australian Financial Review, March 27, 2004: “Today you have to swear at a speech recognition system to get transferred to a human operator…”
      • From Neuvoice Industry News, 03/15/2004: “Researchers at the University of Southern California have devised a voice recognition system which can tell…”
      • From The Miami Herald, March 6, 2004: “Who among us has not experienced the frustration of being trapped in an automated phone system…”
      • From Financial Times (London, England), March 5, 2004: “Who among us has not experienced the frustration of being trapped in…”
      • March 5, 2004: Prof. Narayanan was interviewed for a live radio show on the speech recognition-call center project…” (Link)
      • From ACM TechNews, Volume 6, Issue 614: “University of Southern California researchers are working on software that switches…” (Read more in tecnews)
      • From Focus Magazine, Germany, March 1, 2004: “Shrikanth Narayanan’s program determines the defree of frustration of users…”

      February 2004

      • From Technology Review, page 16: “The automated telephone call centers companies use to reduce costs can drive customers crazy…”
      • From Wired News, February 10, 2004: “Getting transferred from one automated message to another while stuck in a company’s convoluted telephone system…” (Read more in Wired)

      September 2003

      • From USC Chronicle, Volume 23, Number 2, page 1: “Shrikanth Narayanan, a speech processing investigator in the USC School of Engineering’s Integrated Media Systems Center, has received…”
      • From USC Chronicle, Volume 23, Number 5, page 1: “Their work, funded by annual faculty fellowships, have led to innovative projects and unexpected collaborations…”

      June 2003

      • From IMSC News, page 1: “Dr. Shrikanth Narayanan, a key IMSC investigator in speech processing, has received an Early Career Award…”

      April 2003

      • Shri receives the 2003 Junior Faculty Research Award.From Chronicle, Volume 22, Number 31: “A USC school of Engineering state-of-the school address and awards ceremony was attended…”