2008

Viterbi School freshman Jasmine Thum thought she could get a more well-rounded, quality education at USC. She wasn’t wrong.

Project:Possibility "grew out of an idea two years ago by Christopher Leung, then a master’s degree candidate in computer science and engineering at the university."

Under the direction of CS Professor Priya Vashishta, USC’s Center for High-Performance Computing and Communications has moved up to 7th-place standing among U.S. academic supercomputers in the most recent trials.

In an extended interview, Cliff Neuman, director of the Viterbi School's Center for Computer Systems Security, discusses job prospects and USC course offerings

Constantinos Sioutas, co-director of the Southern California Particle Center, offers a detailed discussion of different dangers from different kinds of emissions on KCRW's Which Way L.A.?.

Todd Brun of the Hsieh department finds that temporal-tunnel 'wormholes' might permit decryption of long-thought-unbreakable qubit coding, Science News reports.

"It didn't have to end like that." On the widely read website Surfline, Astani department wave expert Jose Borrero analyzes what went wrong in the waters off El Segundo

The story details how Astani Department Professor Yan Xiao invented "GluBam," a sustainable and economical building material now in widening use in China for sturdy houses, bridges and schools

The work of biomedical engineering professor Theodore Berger, known for his brain chip work, is included in Scientific America's November 2008 cover story, "Plugging into the Brain." The article describes some of Berger's work to mimic memory formation in the hippocampus of a rat's brain.

A lecture by Thomas F. Budinger, M.D., of the University of California, Berkeley, delivered October 18 at a weekend USC Engineering-Medical retreat to discuss future collaboration.

More than 100 faculty from USC’s medical and engineering schools spent a weekend together Oct. 17-19, exploring opportunities for enhanced collaboration.

GamePipe's Mike Zyda of CS and others from USC and the industry are interviewed: "The skills they teach [at USC] fit perfectly with what we're trying to do," comments a game development recruiter.

The USC transportation safety expert blames a higher-than-average Metrolink accident rate on "outdated and messy safety-related policies, procedures and practices."

A guest editorial by a Schlumberger executive quotes the Mork Department's Iraj Ershaghi and praises "innovative programs, such as those offered at USC," as key to "a major transformation" in the industry

"Your New Backing Band: Radiohead, Green Day or Both" — Software created by ISE's Elaine Chew and CS PhD alumna Ching-Hua Chuan can generate accompaniment in any style.

"The current regulatory, oversight and operational structure for ensuring rail safety in California is not working," ISE safety specialist Najmedin Meshkati argues in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

Security Management magazine examines the ARMOR software developed by CS Professor Milind Tambe and PhD student Praveen Parachuri, designed to "Keep the Adversary Guessing," and successfully tested at LAX.

The September/October issue of Technology Review has an extended article on a Boston "concert and lecture exploring the long-established connection between music and mathematics" by the Viterbi School's Elaine Chew, director of the USC Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory.

Childrens Hospital "is working closely with Robert Neches, a division director at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, on ways to revolutionize disaster-preparation training."

Canada's Discovery Channel website covers efforts by Maja Matarić of the Viterbi School's Computer Science Department to develop a robotic system to aid therapists treating children with ASD.

The first issue of the new electronic newsletter produced by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency features a Q&A with the director of the USC Collaboratory for Advanced Computing and Simulations, both on his work creating supermaterials and on general WMD defense basic research priorities.

A recent report describes how CS Professor Cyrus Shahabi is successfully adapting his Progressive Data Analysis (ProDA) system, which applies signal processing ideas to data processing problems, to the software giant's computing platforms.

A June 30 story in the Wall Street Journal describes the influence of Viterbi School alumnus Alireza Azmandian, who "was drawn to the motivational-speaker circuit when he was a graduate student in the U.S."

The British tech-in-education magazine Vision takes a long look at how young students might profit from hands-on experience with the modular shape-changing robots developed at ISI

Iraj Ershaghi of the Mork Family Department discussed the potential for increasing production from the 9-billion-barrel oil field that lies under Southern California.

A 25th anniversary story describes "brilliant" 1983 work by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel in creating the now-universal .com, .edu, .gov, .org domain name system at the Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute.

Shrikanth Narayanan's research into speech emotion detection receives a detailed account in an 'Annals of Technology' story in the June 23 issue.

Glaucoma patients and those with other eye diseases may benefit from a simple polymer device that attaches to the eye, reports Chemical Technology, in its June 9, 2008 review of new work by biomedical engineer Ellis Meng and her colleagues.

Cars can run on the same fuel used in stoves, and "I think the United States, at least in urban areas, could do the same kind of thing that Argentina is doing," make natural gas available at filling stations, AME Professor Paul Ronney said.

The director of the Viterbi School's Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems and Senior Associate Dean for Research appears on Paul Peterson's Channel 35 weekly discussion show to explain her vision of mechanical creatures who can help the elderly.

The newspaper portrays the Viterbi School as the destination for "an academic tidal wave from the Indian Ocean," thanks to its excellent overseas reputation, outreach trips and welcoming campus environment. The article spotlights Indian Student Association president Guarav Kumar, Senior Associate Dean Cauligi Raghavendra and others.

Costas Synolakis praises the Chinese government's willingness to accept outside aid after the devastating 7.9 tremblor, but faults its failure to enforce building codes.

G4 Web TV airs an extended discussion with B. Clifford Neuman of ISI, director of the USC Center for Computer Systems Security.

Aerospace engineering Prof. Geoff Spedding's bat flight studies received top billing in today's New York Times, as well as National Public Radio and Science Daily.

Professor Francisco Valero-Cuevas's work on brain-hand circuitry was featured in many widely read science and medical publications.

Wei-Min Shen introduces his modular, reconfigurable robots as part of a feature report by the British Broadcasting Company on the ongoing revolution in thinking machines.

CNET covers the ISI researcher's investigation of rates of student peer-to-peer file sharing, s study which casts doubt on industry claims of huge financial losses from university-based web exchanges of movie files.

Clifford Neuman, director of the USC Center for Computer Security, told KTLA-TV & KCBS audiences how attackers were able to disable the Church of Scientology website by overloading it.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, transportation expert James E. Moore, II, chair of the Daniel J. Epstein Department, and consultant Tom Rubin show how much public transit has been impacted by construction and funding of the city's rail network.