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DEN Offers Six New Master of Science Degrees and SAP Certification The USC Viterbi School of Engineering Distance Education Network (DEN) has added six new Master of Science degrees this year bringing the number to 24 programs available entirely online. DEN now offers more engineering degree programs online than any other leading research university. “DEN has experienced exponential growth,” says Kelly Goulis, DEN’s executive director. “In the past two years, DEN has doubled its degree offerings. As technology advances in new fields, we continue to provide professional engineers the skill sets they need to further their career and education.” Added this year are two master’s degree programs in petroleum engineering, which involves the technology of economically developing subterranean reservoirs of oil, gas, steam and hot water. One of the petroleum degrees is in Smart Oilfield Technologies, a unique program based upon the petroleum industry’s request to train staff on the operation of smart oilfields. According to Iraj Ershaghi, director of the petroleum engineering program, “simple, traditional drill-and-pump methods leave as much as 80 percent of the oil in a reservoir in the ground. The modern methods we will teach can recover 60 percent of the in-place
hydrocarbons, or even more.” Other new programs are in medical device and diagnostic engineering; biomedical engineering (medical imaging and imaging informatics); computer-aided engineering and system safety and security. This last degree emerged from the new Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence at USC. It is designed to develop leaders in
industry and government who will be trained to develop and evaluate systems that protect against natural disasters, accidents and attacks by terrorists or criminals. “One of the particular emphases of the center will be attacks on infrastructure, because of their potential not only for loss of life, but
talents from industry, academia and government. Chris Kyriakakis, associate professor of electrical engineering, helped organize this year’s program and Paul Debevec, an assistant researcher professor of computer science and executive producer of graphics research at the Institute for Creative Technologies, is a featured speaker. Dean Nikias has appointed Professor George Chilingar as the USC Viterbi School’s first International Advancement Ambassador. The dean cited his
successes in promoting SaudiAmerican friendships and his teaching, research and philanthropy. Firdaus Udwadia has been elected a fellow of the American Society Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Udwadia is a professor of civil engineering and aerospace and mechanical engineering in the USC Viterbi School; a professor of mathematics in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and a professor of information operation management in the USC Marshall School of Business.
impact on the economy,” says Randolph Hall, center co-director, senior associate dean for research and professor of industrial and systems engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. DEN is also offering an academic certificate in SAP, one of the world’s leading client/server enterprise application software packages. The objective of the certification program is to give undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to gain knowledge of the SAP R/3 system, currently used in over 19,000 companies worldwide. SAP is the world’s largest inter-enterprise software company, and the world’s thirdlargest overall independent software supplier next to Microsoft and Oracle. “As technology continues to evolve, knowledge of this widely used system will enhance the careers and education of our students,” says Goulis. Curriculum for the new program comes from state-of-the-art courses in the School’s information technology program as well as SAP, and is designed to provide professional engineers and human resources, finance and other business executives with education in the theory and practice of information technology.
Computer scientists Gerard Medioni, professor and department chair; Isaac Cohen, research assistant professor; Jinman Kang, doctoral student and Kalpitkumar Gajera, master’s student, were honored with a best paper award at the first annual workshop on Object Tracking and Classification beyond the Visible Spectrum in July. Their paper, “Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects from Overlapping EO and IR Sensors,” was one of two singled out at the workshop
attended by researchers from academia, the vision industry and military laboratories. The USC Viterbi School has scored another trifecta in the competition for the prestigious Okawa computer science grants. The awards went to Ramesh Govindan, a specialist in embedded networks and director of the Embedded Network Laboratory; Maja Mataric, an expert in adaptive and imitation robotics who is the founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and continued on page 19
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