Doctoral Students Get A Boost

Annenberg Center reinvestment will bolster Viterbi School support for first-year Ph.D. students

A reinvestment of funding in the USC Annenberg Center for Communication to support the rapid growth of crossdisciplinary graduate research and education programs in digital communications and multimedia technologies will help the Viterbi School of Engineering realize its goal of fully supporting all first-year Ph.D. students.

The Annenberg Center, established in 1993 with a historic $120 million gift from the Annenberg Foundation, was designed to foster collaboration among three of the university’s communications-related schools: the Annenberg School for Communication, the School of Cinematic Arts and the Viterbi School of Engineering. This year, funding was shifted to create 100 new graduate fellowships, to be shared among the three schools and supported by at least $4 million per year.

“These are among the premier fellowships at USC,” says Viterbi School Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. “With those fellowships and further increased funding from the USC provost, we can now guarantee the support of more than 100 first-year Ph.D. students.”

The Viterbi School has awarded close to 150 Ph.D.s in the last two consecutive May commencement ceremonies in 2006 and 2007. The university considers support for doctoral students a top priority and recently announced its commitment to triple Ph.D. fellowship funding, raising its annual graduate fellowship funding levels to an unprecedented $15 million. The funds are used to recruit the most promising graduate students nationwide and to develop cutting-edge graduate programs in a broad range of communications-related, digital media and gaming disciplines.

“Along with recruiting new faculty and building the school’s endowment, attracting the best possible Ph.D. students is the best recipe for moving us to a higher level of excellence,” Yortsos says.

The campus-like setting on West Adams Boulevard that has been home to the USC Annenberg Center for Communication will continue to be available for the three schools’ research programs and for Annenberg Ph.D. fellowship students, called Annenberg Fellows. The schools will be able to use this space for conferences, seminars, visiting scholars and interdisciplinary research projects, including many such activities that have already been established with financial support from the center. In order to preserve and enhance these programs, each of the three schools will continue to receive $600,000 annually from the center’s endowment.

“Given that we have made the creation of new Ph.D. student fellowships a top priority, this change will help spur the further transformation of graduate research and education at USC,” says USC Provost C.L. Max Nikias. “These funds are now available for the recruitment of the most talented graduate students—women and men who will advance our research mission and who constitute the next generation of academic professional leaders. Few universities—if any—in the United States can match this level of commitment.”

INTELLIGENT AGENTS — Five newly minted computer science Ph.D.s became part of an exciting new subfield of artificial intelligence, called ‘intelligent agents,’ this year. ‘Agents’ are robots, or software bots on the Web, and intelligent characters in video games. The students’ dissertation work was focused on multi-agent systems, in which these intelligent agents interacted with each other or with people. Left to right: Emma Bowring, Nathan Schurr, Jonathan Pearce, Praveen Paruchuri and Pradeep Varakantham. Professor Milind Tambe is in the center in the black robe.