In the News USC Viterbi School of Engineering projects and faculty continue to generate headlines and here are some of the highlights… DEAN MAX NIKIAS’ efforts to build bridges between the Viterbi School and industry were the subject of a major interview on Marketplace Radio May 5, which mentioned specifically the Viterbi School’s $5 million research grant from Chevron Texaco. “What I watch is that we don’t want to compromise any academic integrity,” said Nikias. Two days earlier, SocalTECH.com published its interview with the dean about the Viterbi gift and the School’s dynamic. “This place is on fire,” he said.
National Science Foundation’s Engineering News ran a feature on research developed by BEHROKH KHOSHNEVIS to use robotic technology to build a house in 24 hours. Regarding his achievement in building a complete wall using the system, they declared it “the most historic wall since the Great Wall of China.” The system has also attracted notice in publications in France, Spain, Britain, Italy, Brazil, Vietnam, Russia, Ukraine, Finland, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, along with earlier features in The New York Times and NBC Network News.
“9/11 was a failure of imagination,” said RANDY HALL, co-director of the USC Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) in an August 22 Los Angeles Times story (carried on AP) about CREATE’s USC campus simulation of the effects of the explosion of a dirty bomb on the L.A. waterfront. “This university center has a mission to exchange ideas to look at long-term threats.” Voice of America, La Opinión, and National Public Radio also covered the story. Hall was quoted a few days later on KNBC on the terror situation in Russia, and earlier in the Washington Times and KFWB about CREATE’s new degrees in antiterrorism.
IRAJ ERSHAGHI’S op-ed in the May 2 Los Angeles Times called for effective aid to small oil producers to increase the low recovery rate from the nation’s oil wells. A new masters program Ershaghi has started on “smart” oil extraction technology, which will be available through the Viterbi School’s Distance Education Network (DEN), was reported on in media serving oil producing areas, including the Houston Chronicle, Bakersfield Californian and Rocky Mountain News. Ershaghi, an expert on world oil reserves, was quoted. See story on DEN’s new degree programs on page 17.
JAMES MOORE and NAJM MESHKATI offered perspectives on future auto travel and safety in the August 29 Los Angeles Times Magazine. Moore foresaw an increase in automatic controls on cars, while acknowledging “the stakes of failure [in an automated highway] are much higher.” Meshkati, who specializes in safety problems of highly technical systems — air travel, nuclear power, etc. — noted that the interaction of human factors with automated systems was complex. A July 10 Times story about the L.A. Metro Greenline system also quoted Moore, while Meshkati was interviewed in The Australian about nuclear plant safety in an article on “Narrowing the Human Factor.” On July 6, The New York Times ran a major feature on the Information Sciences Institute’s (ISI) addition of artificial intelligence and speech recognition to a commercial computer game program to create a powerful system to teach Arabic quickly to military personnel. LEWIS JOHNSON, the director of ISI’s Center for Research in Technology for Education, and HANNES VILHJALMSSON were quoted and pictured in the story. The same project was featured in the June 14 Newsweek and on ABCNews.com’s FutureTech on March 9. Aerospace engineer DON SHEMANSKY, who has an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph on the Cassini spacecraft that rendezvoused with Saturn this summer, was featured in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times on July 3, along with other stories in such outlets as Chemical & Engineering News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Reuters, as well as a special report in the July 9 issue of Science. Mechanical engineer PAUL RONNEY was the most prominently featured researcher in a long story about tiny internal combustion engines the size of a penny or smaller in the June 14 issue of New Scientist. Ronney also spoke about the history of the more familiar, larger ones on “Modern Marvels,” broadcast on the History Channel. ROBERT SCHOLTZ’S prestige as the world’s leading authority on the technology of Ultrawideband enabled him to conduct an international experts poll on what the first uses for the new technology would be — a study reported on in CMP’s EE Times and CommsDesign on June 4, Wireless.com, and other industry publications. See story on page 8.
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SHRIKANTH NARAYANAN’S work on software to detect emotion in voices continued to draw attention, adding a prominent story in Newsweek May 17 and a designation of the system as one of five “ideas to watch” by INC.COM. Naranayan’s work was also previously covered in numerous international print and web publications, such as the French magazine L’Expresse which headlined “Détecteurs de fureur.” In June, Texas Innovator, a monthly newsletter published by the state as a “toolbox for the 20th century,” included it as a new tool. Readers in Britain — and scientists worldwide — saw prominent stories on PETER WILL and WEI-MIN SHEN’S work on modular minirobots that can knit themselves together in diverse forms controlled by multipurpose “hormonal” software. Nature magazine published reportage of a London demonstration of the technology, followed by a prominent story on May 25 in The Times of London. “Professor Shen says, ‘We can literally take the legs off a spider and plug them into the head and it becomes a snake.’” Will was also interviewed on space faring robots for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s science program “The Buzz” on June 12. A breakthrough in the use of “quantum dot” receptors for detection of infrared emissions was made by ANUPAM MADHUKAR of USC and Joe Campbell of the University of Texas/Austin and was heavily covered in the industrial press, in such publications as Compound/Semi News, NanotechWeb, the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society’s InTech, Innovations Report, and Compound Semiconductors. Additionally, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which funded the effort, singled out the achievement as one of the “July Accomplishments” in the Air Force Research Laboratory News source. Also in nanotech, new research on composite nanocables by CHONGWU ZHOU received widespread industry coverage. Materials Today, Nanotechnology News, the MEMS and Nanotechnology Clearinghouse, Nanojournal, and other specialty publications carried stories on the work. See story on Zhou on page 25. LEN ADLEMAN’S work using the genetic substance DNA as a computational medium was part of an April 29 report in The New York Times about a new DNA based computer that has been proposed to diagnose disease and automatically dispense medication to treat it.