2005

The January, 2006 issue of Scientific American carries an 8-page story co-authored by USC Tsunami Research Center Director Costas Synolakis. "In the tragic aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December, 2004, scientists and warning centers are now better equipped to forecast and model these monstrous waves."

DETER, a facility jointly operated by the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute and UC Berkeley, was extensively discussed, and its ISI director Terry Benzel extensively quoted, in a story in the December issue of HSToday entitled "DETERing Cyberterror."

Viterbi School tsunami experts Jose Borrero and Costas Synolakis figure prominently in a feature that interviews a select community of experts to probe what has happened -- and what still needs to happen -- to give the Indian Ocean basin an effective warning system.

EE Times profiles the work of biomedical engineer Ted Berger (of the USC Viterbi Center for Neural Engineering) and chip engineer John Granacki (of ISI) as part of its "Great Minds, Great Ideas" project.

The December issue of IEEE's The Institute magazine profiles the director of the MOSIS chip brokerage, "a groundbreaking program that has introduced tens of thousands of engineering students to the real world of integrated circuit design ...[and] also gives businesses, universities, and government labs a means of inexpensively producing prototypes."

Dean Yannis C. Yortsos of the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering has signed a memorandum of understanding with officials from the Aerospace, Education, Research & Operations Institute to offer engineering courses to Antelope Valley residents through the university's Distance Education Network.

Tim Langdell of the Viterbi School Information Technology Program's curriculum in interactive games spoke about the rise of instruction in the subject in academia. " "It's a 31 billion-dollar-a-year industry worldwide," he said

Science writer Byron Spice discusses the report of a panel chaired by the Viterbi School's George Bekey on the state of the art of robotics in the world — a world in which the U.S. is only one of a number of active sites for research and development.

The biomedical engineer's pioneering work on "brain chips" is among the selected research in a special 25th anniversary issue in October 2005.

USC turns 125 and the Viterbi School is celebrating a centennial of engineering. Check out the latest issue of our newsletter, USC Viterbi Engineering News. Read about upcoming USC Festival 125 events, and much more.

News reporter Adolfo Guzman Lopez interviews the Epstein department engineer-pianist, winner of a recent Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, about her "groundbreaking" work on computational music cognition. (sound file)

Life & Times and the Persian Journal explore Shrikanth Narayanan's Farsi translation system that helps patients and physicians communicate.

Teaching screenwriting to scientists was the brainstorm of Martin Gundersen, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and sometime Hollywood technical adviser..."

In an article for Black Issues in Higher Education, Adam Powell, director of the USC Viterbi School's Integrated Media Systems Center says the gap between White newsrooms and a rapidly diversifying America is growing.

Behrokh Khoshnevis: "We envision a system that can automatically build a full-scale house in about 24-hours with all the electrical and plumbing imbedded and even painted or wallpapered using computer technology."

Tactical Iraqi, a videogame that teaches soldiers Iraqi language and customs, is featured in a report by the Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes.

On World Radio's Science and Society, Peter Will from the USC Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute describes his project to develop reconfigurable robots.

KCBS-TV's Stacey Butler reported June 20 on Behrohk Khoshnevis's Contour Crafting housebuilding process from his laboratory at ISI in Marina del Rey.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Jose Borrero, a member of the USC tsunami research team headed by Costas Synolakis, is the only one doing it.

"Forget those tedious piano lessons...Researchers at the University of Southern California have developed a computerized system that allows the user to play music using a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals."

The BBC World Service "Science in Action" program reported June 17 on work on housebuilding robots: "Most manufactured goods are built with robotic help and although bricks and mortar are thought to be safely in the hands of humans, they might not be for much longer. (MP3 sound file)

Viterbi emigré Iranian chemical engineer Muhammed Sahimi discusses Iran's upcoming election and its nuclear program in a Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written by Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi.

New Scientist reports in its June 11 issue on work by the Information Sciences Institute's Wei-Min Shen on robots that build themselves from "units that can join together to form ... a snake, or a multi-legged insect, or even curl up into a ring. ... Late last year NASA announced a $28 million grant to Shen's group."

BetterHumans, a sci-tech publication dedicated to enabling communications technology, features new rehabilitation haptics systems in development at USC's Integrated Media Systems Center. The story also appeared in I-Newswire.com and Stereoscopy.com – 3D-News.

Noelle Stiles began working in Prof. Armand R. Tanguay, Jr.'s Optical Materials and Devices Laboratory when she was a high school junior. Now a senior, she's won a set of prizes and honors.

The Los Angeles Business Journal features an opinion piece by Viterbi School Associate Professor Najmedin Meshkati on ways to revitalize the city's jewelry district, based on a recently published USC study.

Donovan Artz, a Viterbi grad student specializing in artificial intelligence at ISI, is the coach for the Venice High botball team. "It seemed like a great way to get kids involved in critical thinking," said Artz.

New Scientist reports on the HUTT imaging system developed by Viterbi biomedical engineers. "It's the holy grail of medical imaging - a safe, non-invasive, high-resolution scanner that can peer inside organs, pinpoint particular tissues and even differentiate between benign and malignant growths. And it is within reach at last."

USC Viterbi School tsunami researchers, have been in the field studying the catastrophic tsunamis in South Asia and the very strong March aftershocks. Science is the latest publication to cover their research.

Discover Magazine reports in detail on the "Contour Crafting" process Behrokh Khoshnevis has developed at the Viterbi School, and on Khoshnevis' plans to build a house in a single day.

New Scientist— "Most existing translation software uses hand-coded rules for transposing words and phrases. But new software, developed by Kevin Knight and Daniel Marcu at the Information Sciences Institute, part of the University of Southern California [Viterbi School of Engineering] takes a statistical approach..."

National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" considers the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute videogame to teach soldiers "Tactical Iraqi."

CBS Evening News, the Washington Post, L.A. Times and Daily News, as well as radio and overseas broadcast outlets, have interviewed Viterbi School transportation and safety experts Jim Moore II and Najmedin Meshkati about the tragic Metrolink accident in Glendale, CA.

While the real Iraq is more than enough for most people to handle, there's a virtual Iraq lurking on the laptop of psychologist Skip Rizzo, a research scientist at the University of Southern California....

Viterbi School grid computing pioneer Carl Kesselman of the Information Sciences Institute and two collaborators from Argonne Laboratory announce the formation of a new grid computing company.

Popular Science reports on Viterbi engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis' experiments with "oversize inkjet printers that can build custom houses from electronic blueprints."

The Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute partners with UC Berkeley to create a closed miniInternet to test and improve defenses against cyberattacks

The Los Angeles Times Home section reports on the Viterbi School's Behrokh Khoshnevis' plans to create a robotic system to build homes.