2006

The Long Beach Press Telegram reports on a new study by air pollution expert Constantinos Sioutas, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who will begin a new study to measure ultrafine smog particles around Long Beach Port.

"An amazing metal-munching microbe holds out big hopes for an interdisciplinary team of USC scientists in hot pursuit of a cold alternative energy source." The team includes the Viterbi School's Florian Mansfeld, Paul Ronney, Hai Wang and grad student Esra Kus.

"In universities around the country, you can earn a degree in game design technology, and make a lot of money. About 80 universities nationwide have some sort of video gaming curriculum, with the University of Southern California among the top three." Mike Zyda introduces the Viterbi Schools' GamePipe program at length. (video link)

The USC Annenberg Center for Communication and the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC)at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have expanded their partnership. The Annenberg Center has increased support for IMSC research focusing on immersive sound.

The Los Angeles Times reports: "[Ming Hsieh's] $35-million gift to USC's electrical engineering department was announced in a ceremony on campus Monday. USC 'definitely helped me reach the American dream,' Hsieh said. 'I want to help SC educate others, to let them build their dreams.'"

Click Here for News Coverage from this announcement.

Dean Yannis Yortsos discusses his career at USC, how he became dean of the Viterbi School, rankings, the excitement of engineering and much more on Trojan Vision Television.

A Chronicle of Higher Education feature on USC's six-year-old Women in Science and Engineering program, which is using a $20 million endowment to increase female faculty representation in these areas, noted that "the sharpest jump in hiring has occurred at [the] Viterbi School of Engineering."

Weekend America, August 26: "According to Bart Kosko, a professor at the University of Southern California, noise has a lot to offer. He says that noise isn't all bad, and that some is actually healthy. Kosko has written the first scientific history on the subject."

The Daily Trojan reports on a text-messaging scavenger hunt created by the Viterbi School's Information Technology Program. "The goal of the hunt is to "definitely increase awareness about ITP, but also a way to get students involved," said Ashish Soni, program director for ITP.

USC President Steven B. Sample, who is also a professor of electrical engineering in the Viterbi School, authored an article "Problem Solving: Engineers as Leaders in the Spring 2006 issue of The Bridge The magazine is published by Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for electrical and computer engineering.

Henry Koffman, director of the Department of Civil Engineering's Construction Management Program, said in the August issue of California Construction that USC excels in managing its construction projects. "Because USC - unlike public institutions -- can choose who it wants to work with, rather than choose the lowest bidder, the university can get a general contractor on board quickly, he said.

New Scientist: "Two new studies suggest robots need to act more like humans, but not look too much like us, if we are to accept them into our lives. Maja Mataric (left) and Adriana Tapus at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles found that a robotic therapist had more influence if its personality mirrored that of its human patient."

California Connected reports on the widening impact of games — and USC's widening impact in the game world. "At the University of Southern California, researchers are hard at work applying video game technology to areas like education, science and the arts...."

In his new book, Noise, Bart Kosko argues that even the most annoying racket can be beneficial. The USC professor draws on his degrees in electrical engineering, law, mathematics, economics and philosophy to connect the finer points of calculus, game theory, and court precedent to all kinds of random, unpredictable energy. Wired asked Kosko to separate the signal from the noise.

Advanced technology is not enough, Costas Synolakis argues in an impassioned article in the July 25 Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal. To save lives, it must be coupled to an organized and effective plan for evacuation of endangered areas.

The Viterbi School's Wei-Min Shen "spent the past year building what he calls superbots, modular automatons that can break themselves apart and re-form as entirely new devices capable of entirely new things...'Our dream is to build a robot that changes shape and size by itself, depending on the environment and the task at hand,' Shen says."

Science and Society talks to GamePipe director Mike Zyda about his center's exploding research and educational efforts, and about the USC Viterbi School's new B.S. and M.S. computer science degree programs in games.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding research by Wei-Min Shen of the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute designed to improve defense planners' ability to make accurate predictions.

"We have a long way to go," said Viterbi School Tsunami Reseaerch center director Costas Synolakis, quoted in a Science news brief regarding the recently inaugurated UNESCO warning network.

An industrial engineering approach to patient flow, developed by Randolph Hall, vice provost for research advancement who is also a member of the Viterbi School faculty, is featured in OR/MS Today, published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Elaine Chew of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering discusses her work and teaching in the emerging field of computational music cognition on the Internet radio weekly program Science and Society (mp3 audio file)

USC's Trojan Family magazine profiles the Viterbi School's maker of "caring contraptions," a new generation of assistive robots with social interaction skills programmed into them, not just workers but "companions and encouragers."

Daniel ChangHyun Kim, playing on the CCRMA stage at Stanford (above) and Leila Vaziri playing in USC's PHE106 (below) connect via two-way low latency audio for two movements of a Mozart keyboard duet.

A 20-minute Internet radio interview with ISI Fellow Kevin Knight on computer systems to turn one language into another, including why computers have so much trouble understanding what a verb is -- and what he's doing to help them.

Coverage of ISI's Wei-Min Shen's demonstration of "a locomotive jack-of-all-trades, designed to cope with a variety of terrains and be versatile enough to function in unpredictable environments" at an Orlando, Fla robotics conference

Video games that can tell what you're feeling and even alter how the game reacts to you based on your emotional state are on the horizon, says Mike Zyda, who heads up the USC Viterbi School's video game development program. Weekend America host Barbara Bogaev (left) tries out an early prototype of this emotion-reading technology.

Emeritus professor Irving Reed tells the story of a group of brilliant young engineers working at Northrop after WWII to build one of the world's first digital computers, in a chapter reprinted from his book, Alaska to Algorithms.

USC's Daily Trojan reports on the student engineers building a Formula SAE racecar from scratch, getting tools and materials through donations - "many of which come from the school of engineering," and with the help of faculty advisor Geoffrey Shiflett (AME).

"The USC software project delivers the kind of real-time data layering that was made up for TV shows like 24. Adam Clayton Powell III, director of USC's Integrated Media Systems Center, says that 'it's fictional if you're watching 24, but it's real in here.'"

The USC Viterbi School's namesake is portrayed as "The Quiet Genius" in a feature length article in a publication of one of engineering's oldest honor societies.

"USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, named for an Italian immigrant," was the scene of the report, which included an interview with Yannis Yortsos, "its dean, who hails from Greece. 'A lot of students who come here get educated and then start a startup company and they're very, very successful.'" Grad student Amit Desai was also quoted.

She credits Associate Dean Louise Yates and Professor Maged Dessouky for putting her on the path to ISE (B.S. 2001) and then Northrop-Grumman: "I'm enjoying the journey, and that's really what it's all about."

"These self-configuring autonomous robots can transform themselves to climb stairs, fit through tight spaces and even alter their size." (Video .mov file)

"'The short answer is no one really knows what kind of emotions people want in robots,' said the Viterbi School's Maja Matarić, featured in a March 5 "Week in Review" story in The New York Times.

"The day of creating realistic simulated macro-disasters on a citywide scale is drawing near," the Daily Breeze reported March 6, noting that the Viterbi School's Milind Tambe and Nathan Schurr are "leading a computer-modeling effort to create just such a program in conjunction with the Los Angeles Fire Department." TV stations KTTV (11) and KCOP (13) also covered the story.

An article in the March issue of Scientific American on "The Elusive Goal of Machine Translation" identifies Kevin Knight of ISI as 'the pioneer in statistical translation,' and extensively quotes him on the future of the discipline. The work of Franz Och, formerly at the institute and identified in the story with USC/ISI, is also a major topic of consideration.

Los Angeles Times "Golden State" business columnist Michael Hiltzik reports in detail on the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute and its plans for expansion of its portfolio of corporate-funded research. Includes quotes from ISI executive director Herbert Schorr and USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias.

The work of Irving Reed, "professeur d'informatique à l'université de Californie du Sud," is featured in the influential monthly La Recherche. A historical essay, "The Algebra that Corrects Errors," discusses his co-creation of the Reed-Solomon error-correction codes.

The Viterbi School's celebration of 100 years of engineering at USC continues as departments host a series of distinguished lectures during the Spring Semester.