Shrikanth Narayanan is an esteemed researcher and academic in the field of engineering and computer science. He is an Indian-American scientist who has made significant contributions to the areas of speech and language processing, as well as affective computing and machine learning. At that time, he held various prestigious positions, including being a Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California (USC). He also served as the founding director of USC's Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) and the Ming Hsieh Institute.