2007

Maja Mataric's work on robots of all kinds was the subject of an extended segment on KTLA. Robots able to express emotion may become a reality within a decade, Mataric´ predicted; in the meantime, they are becoming more and more useful in the home, school, rest home, hospital — and even the yard.

"Michael Zyda, creator and Director of the USC GamePipe Laboratory for game development ... discussed his mission to reinvigorate computer science and invest more in the research, development and education of new game technology."

In a Houston Chronicle opinion essay, Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos argues for urgently increased federal funding supporting basic research in energy.

Paul Debevec of the Institute of Creative Technologies is a subject of a major Physics Today story on how computer scientists are giving animated films and videogames "some of the same magical eye the Renaissance painters had," by ingeniously applying the physics of the behavior of light.

The Los Angeles Business Journal reports on "El Segundo-based Geosemble Technologies Inc., a three-year-old spinoff from USC Viterbi School of Engineering," set up by computer scientists Cyrus Shahabi and Craig Knoblock. "Ten engineers have nurtured the baby technology since its inception in a USC classroom in 2000."

"The Viterbi School of Engineering placed 12th in the world in the engineering, technology and computer science programs category in the 2007 Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings of the world's top 100 universities," reported the USC Daily Trojan.

Research on airport security led by Milind Tambe of the Viterbi School department of computer science working with USC's Homeland Security-funded Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events received worldwide media attention.

Newsweek reports in detail on LAX airport security's "new weapon in their fight against terrorism: complete, baffling randomness." To create the system, folks at LAX turned to the computer scientists at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering," to a team led by Milind Tambe, and a PhD thesis by grad student Praveen Paruchuri, brought to LAX by CREATE.

The U.S. Office of CyberInfrastructure recently gave a 3-year grant to Ewa Deelman's project, which, says Deelman, "automatically chains dependent tasks together, so that a single scientist can complete complex computations that once required many different people."

Headlining the opening session of the SPE's first R&D conference, Dean Yannis "Yortsos [challenged] the audience to consider some of the major issues that may hinder innovation, 'namely the shortage of technical people, negative public perceptions of the E&P sector, and the challenge of producing the next trillion while transforming the industry into a leader of clean power initiatives'"

The Brazilian science magazine Galileu's September issue includes a Q&A with Najmedin Meshkati of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, discussing issues ranging from Iran's nuclear program to quake-prone Japanese nuclear reactors to recent Brazilian air and oil platform disasters. (in Portuguese)

Viterbi School engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis' house-in-a-day automated construction technique makes the influential business magazine's short list of potentially revolutionary innovations.

The Viterbi school's much-honored William E. Leonard professor was in the Ural mountain region headlining a symposium on materials science innovation and commercialization with his photo on the front page the local paper paying tribute to the event's organizer, Professor Ruslan Valiyev, "a personality who is showing himself a leader." [Russian language pdf]

The Viterbi School's charismatic senior associate dean for research has written a new book in her specialty, "a broadly accessible introduction to robotics for students at pre-university and university levels, robot hobbyists, and anyone interested in this burgeoning field, ... ]It] is unique as a principled, pedagogical treatment of the topic that is accessible to a broad audience; the only prerequisites are curiosity and attention."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, the civil engineer criticizes his homeland for over-reliance on high tech showpieces like air tankers at the expense of old-fashioned on-the-ground organization, local training, and capital investment.

MS computer science candidate Lakshmi Mallikarjun Kodali shares his experiences at USC with readers of the Times of India: "The expenditure at USC was like an investment on myself; I knew that this would be the best platform for a successful career. My University has a very large population of international students, which makes it very easy for students from other countries to settle down and find friends..."

The Medicus System for sharing X-ray and other medical images, created in a collaboration with Childrens Hospital and the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute, was named one of "10 cool cutting-edge technologies on the horizon now" by the influential IT publication.

Henry Koffman, director of the Viterbi School’s Construction Engineering Program said Aug. 2 that it would take six to 12 months to conduct a thorough engineering inspection to determine the cause of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. Koffman was also interviewed on KNX-AM radio, KABC-TV and KTLA-TV.

The Viterbi School's Mike Zyda is the guest editor of the July issue of the prestigious journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, for which he commissioned and wrote an introduction to essays illustrating how 3D games can be entertaining, effective in education, training and other more serious applications.

Najmedin Meshkati of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering recalls his 1986 visit to the Chernobyl, Ukraine reactor, following its catastrophic meltdown. His conclusion: "Nuclear safety must be decoupled from political considerations."

A spread page in Computerworld's 40th anniversary issue celebrates the contributions of the Information Sciences Institute Internet architect Jon Postel, who "helped create and document numerous standards and protocols including TCP/IP, SNMP and DNS [and] is hailed as “the shepherd of the Internet.”

The Daily Breeze reports a study that combines the microbiology expertise of the College's David Caron "with the robotics knowledge of Gaurav Sukhatme, director of the Robotics Embedded Systems Lab. Bottom line: "a great example of how you can get government and the academic-scientific community working together to solve a problem."

The May issue of Focus magazine, published in Warsaw, contains a feature about Gerald Loeb's work with "radio nerves," bions, implanted in patients.

A widely carried syndicated feature gave a detailed account of "game day" at the Viterbi School's GamePipe LaboratoryThe story included interviews with GamePipe director Mike Zyda, industry representatives, students, and CS chair Gérard Medioni.

The Viterbi School's Geoff Spedding and an international team of researchers were in the spotlight this week after publishing new research on the aerodynamics of bat flight in the May 11, 2007 issue of Science magazine.

Associate Dean Margery Berti pens an article, “Current Trends in Engineering: A Dean’s Perspective” in Connections to help international students who want to study engineering in the U.S.

In the USC Report Card Spring 2007 published by the Daily Trojan, only one school receives an A. “Any school whose students and faculty figured out how we can all use our cell phones at once—but who also auction themselves off for dates…is golden in our book.”

Fox News visits Wei-Min Shen's Information Science Institute lab and a nearby park to report on SuperBots, modules that assemble themselves into different shapes for different purposes.

ISI Director Herbert Schorr in Wireless Wave magazine: "Here at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (ISI),we are pursuing basic research on a vision of a wireless that doesn’t link individual human users, but rather swarms or committees of machines."

A group of engineering undergraduates in Engineers Without Borders spent spring break in a small Honduran town gathering data to design a sustainable water distribution and sanitation station.

Sarah Nothnagel, an astronautical engineering major and USC Presidential Scholar, is ready to play hard and "make it a true daily double" at popular quiz show's college championship taping April 21 and 22 at the Galen Center.

"I see the potential of this incredible technology in artificial intelligence. For a long time we've benefited from AI in military and industrial areas, but we're only beginning to bring it into the K-12 world."

Wei-Min Shen's modular robots were featured in detail in a story on "soft" robotics. "Shen said the ultimate goal was for Superbot to decide for itself the configuration best-suited to a particular task, describing them as 'smart Transformers' after the shape-shifting cartoon toys."

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering climbed to seventh place among the best public and private engineering schools in the nation in this year's U.S. News & World Report guide to "America's Best Graduate Schools."

"A blended approach helps to guide researchers at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where the 'Superbot' can configure itself to squirm like a worm, crawl like a turtle, roll like a tire and more.... Wei-Min Shen, the director of the institute’s polymorphic robotics laboratory [discussed] communication among robots that is inspired by hormones. 'Because there’s no fixed brain, we need a signal that will circulate within the system.'"

Neuroscientist Ted Berger thinks he can upgrade that big computer we call the brain. An eight-page story in Popular Science discusses work at the Center for Neural Engineering by Berger, and work at the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute with colleagues including Vijay Srinivasan, John Granacki, and Jeff LaCoss.

A team of astronautics undergraduates defies gravity on spring break testing their fire ball experiment aboard NASA's weightlessness-inducing airplane.

Joe Sullivan and Carole Beal from the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute discussed their work to create new ways to teach science and math to middle school students. (.mp3 file)

"A California academic named Behrokh Khoshnevis is sure he can do it. Khoshnevis — an inventor, engineering professor and director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies at the University of Southern California [Viterbi School of Engineering] — says the idea is a simple one. ..."

A Trojan Family magazine feature spotlights USC interdisciplinary research developing ultrasmall devices and specialized materials to fight diseases, describing collaborations by the Viterbi School's Chongwu Zhou, Aristides Requicha, Anupam Madhukar, and also Ted Lee's pathbreaking Mork family Department class in 'nano-blacksmithing.'

An essay by Najmedin Meshkati of the Epstein Department vehemently endorses the report of a panel chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker in the wake of the catastrophic March 2005 Texas City refinery explosion.

The Los Angeles Times interviewed Epstein Department associate professor Elaine Chew about her upcoming concert at Newman Hall, including a performance of a piece by composer Tamar Diesendruck.

A New York Times story describes how university technology finds its way to market and features the USC Stevens Institute and the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute

If successful, the biomedical team would be significantly closer to designing a brain implant that could improve or restore people's memory.

The Times of London reported on work on robotic systems for house construction at the Viterbi School and in England. "The architectural options will explode," predicted Dr Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles... "We will be able to build curves and domes as easily as straight walls."

Adam Clayton Powell III: "In 2007, we're going to see the rise of microlocal applications...where you can go in and construct a 3-D model of your neighborhood or, if you're walking around with a cell phone, the cell phone will tell the system where you are, far more accurately even than now, and you will be able to get advertising to your cell phone."