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Viterbi Research on the NAE Grand Challenges
Tackling Engineering's 'Grand Challenges'
Viterbi researchers take up call from the National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has announced 14 Grand Challenges that must be addressed in the early years of the 21st century if we are to safeguard our natural resources, promote quality of life worldwide and build a more secure and sustainable future for an ever-growing global population.
The Viterbi School has welcomed NAE’s call to action, and in fact is already involved with many ongoing research initiatives (listed below) that nearly match one-for-one all of NAE’s challenges. These major initiatives are in the areas of:
Advance Health Informatics: Stronger health information systems not only improve everyday medical visits, but they are essential to counter pandemics and biological or chemical attacks.
Engineer Better Medicines: Engineers are developing new systems that use genetic information, sense small changes in the body, assess new drugs, and deliver vaccines.
Reverse-Engineer the Brain: The intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.
• Biomedical Simulations Resource (BMSR): Using computational engineering tools to solve biomedical phenomena (David D’Argenio, Vasilis Marmarelis).
• Center for Genomic and Phenomic Studies in Autism: Survey and build world’s largest database of genetic, physical and behavioral profiles of children with autism (Clara Lajonchere, Constantinos Sioutas).
Prevent Nuclear Terror: The need for technologies to prevent and respond to a nuclear attack is growing.
Secure Cyberspace: It’s more than preventing identity theft. Critical systems in banking, national security, and physical infrastructure may be at risk.
• Information Sciences Institute’s DETER (Defense Technology Experimental Research) program: Developing systems to prevent cyber attacks and develop countermeasures (Clifford Neuman, John Wroclawski, Jelena Mirkovic, Terry Benzel).
Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure
Good design and advanced materials can improve transportation and energy, water, and waste systems, and also create more sustainable urban environments.
Advance Personalized Learning: Instruction can be individualized based on learning styles, speeds, and interests to make learning more reliable.
Enhance Virtual Reality: True virtual reality creates the illusion of actually being in a difference space. It can be used for training, treatment, and communication.
• USC Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC): Developing immersive visualization technologies for geospatial decision-making (James Baker, Ulrich Newmann, Cyrus Shahabi).
• USC GamePipe Laboratory: Supporting serious games research and development (Michael Zyda).
In the century ahead, engineers will continue to be partners with scientists in the great quest for understanding many unanswered questions of nature.
• Interactive Knowledge Capture team (Yoland Gil) is building "knowledge acquisition tools" that will be easily usable by scientists who are not computer science experts.
• ISI’s Pegasus Project (Ewa Deelman) automates discovery steps, "compiling not just software and data, but expertise." Deelman and Jose-Luis Ambite are applying these tools to DNA database exploration.