Behavioral Signals, a startup company based on the research of USC Professor Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan, received a 2020 Hacker Noon Noonies Award for “Innovative Company of the Year: Artificial Intelligence Technology.”

The Noonies Awards are determined by votes from Hacker Noon readers, who are mainly engineers and technologists. This year’s awards produced 232,444 votes across five award categories: Technology, Decentralization, Software Development, Future Heroes, and Back to the Internet.

The Noonies Award nomination stated that “Behavioral Signals’ Emotion AI technology and its AI-Mediated Conversations solution have proven ROI in a commercial deployment. A recent case study at a large EU Bank has garnered recognition by Gartner and OMDIA as an example for Emotion AI adoption by industry managers. The company’s AI technology has the ability to gather emotions and behaviors from voice intonation without having to convert speech to text, which is crucial when it comes to user privacy.”

“Winning the award for most Innovative Company of the Year in AI is a great recognition of our work and thought leadership in the groundbreaking fields of NLP and Emotion AI,” Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, said in a news release about the award. “We want to thank the Hacker Noon team and its community for all the support.”

Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, and the International Speech Communication Association. He is a USC University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering. Visit the USC News website for additional articles about Narayanan.

Behavioral Signals was launched in 2016 and is based in Los Angeles.