Shri Narayanan is Andrew J. Verbi Professor of Engineering at USC where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering, and, jointly in, Computer Science, Linguistics and Psychology. His research focuses on human-centered information processing and communication technologies. His presentation on April 12, Behavioral Signal Processing: Possibilities and Opportunities for Informatics, will describe the ongoing efforts on Behavioral Signal Processing -- technology and algorithms for quantitatively and objectively understanding typical, atypical and distressed human behavior -- with a special focus on communicative, affective and social behavior.
This lecture will be on Friday, April 12, 2013 at 12:30pm at 5317 Sennott Square.
Abstract: Human behavior is exceedingly complex. Its expression and experience are inherently multimodal, and are characterized by individual and contextual heterogeneity. The confluence of sensing, communication and computing is however allowing access to data, in diverse forms and modalities, that is enabling us understand and model human behavior in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago. No domain exemplifies these opportunities more than that related to human health and well being. Consider for example the domain of distressed families where crucial diagnostic and therapeutic information comes from manually-observed audiovisual data of verbal and nonverbal behavior. Behavioral signal processing advances can enable not only new possibilities for gathering data in a variety of settings--from laboratory and clinics to free living conditions—but in offering computational models to advance evidence-driven theory and practice.
This talk will describe our ongoing efforts on 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. Using examples drawn from different application domains such as Autism, Addiction and Metabolic health monitoring, the talk will also illustrate Behavioral Informatics applications of these processing techniques that contribute to quantifying higher-level, often subjectively described, human behavior in a domain-sensitive fashion. [Work supported by NIH, NSF, DARPA, and ONR].
Bio: Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering, and, jointly in, Computer Science, Linguistics and Psychology. 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. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Shri Narayanan is an Editor for the Computer, Speech and Language Journal and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, the Journal of Acoustical Society of America and the APISPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing having previously served an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Speech and Audio Processing (2000-2004), the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2005-2008) and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2008-2012). He is a recipient of several honors including the 2005 and 2009 Best Transactions Paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and serving as its Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-11. With his students, he has received a number of best paper awards including winning the Interspeech Challenges in 2009 (Emotion classification), 2011 (Speaker state classification) and in 2012 (Speaker trait classification). He has published over 500 papers and has 14 U.S. patents.