Speaker: Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan
Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL)
University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2564
http://sail.usc.edu

Abstract:
The human speech signal carries crucial information not only about communication intent but also emotions, individual identity, and state of health and wellbeing.  From a basic science perspective, understanding how such rich information is encoded in human speech can illuminate underlying communication mechanisms. From a technology perspective, finding ways for automatically processing and decoding this complex information in speech continues to be of interest for a variety of applications. This includes utilizing direct information about human speech production to inform technology development such as automatic speech and speaker recognition.
A longstanding challenge in speech production research, however, has been the ability to examine real-time changes in the shaping of the vocal tract that can provide direct quantifiable information.  Progressive advances in imaging techniques such as ultrasound, movement tracking and magnetic resonance imaging have been helping to meet this challenge. In this talk, we will highlight recent advances that allow us to perform near real-time investigations on the dynamics of vocal tract shaping during speech. We will also use examples from recent and ongoing research to describe some of the methods and outcomes of processing such data, especially toward facilitating linguistic analysis and modeling, and speech technology development.
[Work supported by NIH, ONR, NSF and DoJ].

Biography of the Speaker:
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics and Psychology, and Director of the Ming Hsieh 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. 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, IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, 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, and as an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16. With his students, he has received a number of best paper awards including the 2014 Ten-year Technical Impact Award from ACM ICMI and Interspeech Challenges in 2009 (Emotion classification), 2011 (Speaker state classification), 2012 (Speaker trait classification), 2013 (Paralinguistics/Social Signals) and in 2014 (Paralinguistics/Cognitive Load). He has published over 650 papers and has been granted 16 U.S. patents.

Place: Bogazici University Electrical&Electronic Eng. Dept. Faculty Lounge (Yorgo Istefanopulos Toplanti Salonu)