IGN: USC Games Expo 2022 to Feature World Premieres of Over 50 Student-Made Games
The upcoming USC Games Expo was featured
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Department of Computer Science
Media Coverage
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Study Finds: Are your finances exposed? 2 in 5 Venmo users publicly reveal sensitive information
A study about personal information exposed on Venmo was featured
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Washington Post: USC scholarship aims to help Black, Indigenous workers enter games industry
The USC Games Gerald A. Lawson Endowment Fund for Black and Indigenous students was highlighted; The forthcoming Games Expo was highlighted.
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Argonne National Lab: Ancient art meets AI for better materials design
Inspired by a type of origami, Viterbi researchers apply autonomous reinforcement learning to develop materials for wearable electronics.
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CNET: Extinct Ice Age Animals Will Be Digitally Resurrected In the Metaverse
A collaboration among the La Brea Tar Pits, NHLA and USC to apply AR as educational tools was highlighted.
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San Bernadino Sun: Cyberthreats from Russia
Cliff Neuman was interviewed about how the challenges of cyberwarfare and cyber defense
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News 18 : USC Viterbi Launches Center for Autonomy and AI
New research Center led Rahul Jain and Jyo Deshmukh was highlighted
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21 Questions with Cheyenne Gaima
Day in the Life of a Skateboarder, Piercer, Poet and Coder
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Science: Dream Machine
Maja Matarić discusses how robots can be used in school to increase social interaction and engagement.
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National Academy of Sciences: Our Future Robot Companions
Maja Matarić gave a virtual talk at the National Academy of Sciences Science & Entertainment Exchange
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Dot LA: USC Expands AI Education With New Research Center, Amazon Partnership
DotLA covered two pieces of Viterbi news this week, Dean Yortsos was interviewed adding, “some sort of a digital literacy will become as important as other general education requirements”
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WIRED: Maybe Green Energy Needs Information Batteries Too
New research by Barath Raghavan was featured
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Analytics India Magazine: Can You Express Your Feelings Through A Haptic Armband, Just Like A Hug?
Professor Culbertson’s research on virtual touch was featured.
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Psychology Today: New Synthetic AI Data May Improve Brain-Computer Interfaces
Research by Laurent Itti that applies the same method that is used to create deep fakes for the benefit of brain- machine interfaces for individuals with disabilities, was featured
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CIFellows 2021: CIFellowships Support Post-Doctoral Research
Emmanuel Johnson and Jasmine Berry have received 2021 Computing Innovation (CI) Fellowships, which help recent and soon-to-be Ph.D. graduates launch their careers in uncertain economic times.
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Washington Post: “We are still here”
The Washington Post wrote about CS PhD student Lina Brixey’s efforts to use computer science to preserve the Choctaw language.
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AI in Healthcare: Behavioral health AI predicts effectiveness of talk therapy
Research by the SAIL lab was featured
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USC Viterbi Magazine : More Than Words – Lina Brixey Uses AI to Preserve the Choctaw Language
Every two weeks a language dies. Lina Brixey, a member of the Choctaw Nation and a USC Viterbi Ph.D. candidate, is determined hers will not be next.
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The Hollywood Reporter: Geena Davis Institute Expands Spellcheck for Bias Partnership with NBCU to Analyze Black and AAPI Representation
The SAIL Lab was mentioned for its collaboration with GDI to identify bias in movie scripts via development of Spellcheck for Bias
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USC News: Are women worse than men at salary negotiation?
USC researchers say this is a fallacy as their new study points to systemic bias on behalf of recruiters in salary negotiations.
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Dot LA: Researchers have begun to study the use of AI to help firefighters strategize controlled burns
Dot.LA featured research that Yolanda Gil, Bistra Dilkina and Michael Pazzani will work on with the San Diego Supercomputer Center to fight wildfires
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USC News : USC Computer Science Students Place Second in Capital One College Bowl Championship
After 10 weeks of competition, a USC team, including two computer science students, finished second to a trio from Columbia University in the final showdown.
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Washington Post: Racism and Automated Decision-Making
An opinion piece cited research by Aleksandra Korolova that concluded that Facebook served different ads to men and women
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WIRED: A simple software fix could limit location data sharing
Research by Barath Raghavan regarding limiting location data sharing was featured
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Venture Beat: Is DeepMind’s new reinforcement learning system a step toward general AI?
VentureBeat quoted Saty Raghavachary on scientists who claim to be able to train an AI system to play games without human interaction data.
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USC : Microsoft Contributes to Gerald A. Lawson Fund
Microsoft’s X-Box Studios announced today that it will make a significant contribution to USC Games’ Gerald A. Lawson Endowment Fund for Black and Indigenous Students.
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Mashable: IKEA furniture instructions just got easier, thanks to this robot
Research by Stefanos Nikolaidis and the ICARUS lab was featured.
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ACM News : Computer Science Professor Wins ‘Test of Time’ Award for Influential Paper
Shang-Hua Teng co-authored a paper on smoothed analysis of algorithms, which offers a more realistic comprehension of algorithmic performance.
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CTV News : Researchers create artificial intelligence to ‘imagine’ unseen objects
A research team at the University of Southern California has developed a new artificial intelligence system that uses human-like abilities to imagine never-before-seen objects.
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Mashable: Robots suck at chopping stuff, but this research could change that
Researchers from NVIDIA and USC teamed up to make a simulation engine that could help autonomous robots with their cutting ability.
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WIRED: Why Scientists Love Making Robots Build Ikea Furniture
Wired featured research by Stefanos Nikolaidis’a ICAROA lab that trains robots to build Ikea furniture.
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KNBC-TV : USC Study: Political Discourse on Twitter Helped Predict COVID-19 Outbreak Sites
KNBC-TV featured research by Kristina Lerman that linked political discourse on Twitter to future COVID-19 outbreaks.
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Los Angeles Daily News: USC’s Pandemic-Tested 2020, 2021 Classes Graduate In Person
Radhika Agrawal, a 2021 graduate with a degree in computer engineering and computer science, was interviewed for participating in the In-person ceremony.
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News4SA: San Antonio Native Unveils New Video Game Inspired by Latino Heritage
2021 CS graduate Sterling Rios was interviewed about a brand new video game he co-developed which was inspired by his indigenous Latino heritage.
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dot.LA: A Conversation with LA’s Head of IT
The City’s use of machine learning to automatically spot graffiti –a tool developed by IMSC–was featured .
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Los Angeles Business Journal: USC to Build New Computer Science Hub
Los Angeles Business Journal interviewed Dean Yortsos regarding the new computer science building
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KCBS-TV: Meet A Robotics Engineer
Stefanos Nikolaidis was featured on the CBS STEAM series for developing robotics for people who have disabilities
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The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Algorithm Shows Gender Bias in Job Ads, Study Finds
The Wall Street Journal featured research by Aleksandra Korolova and John Heidemann, along with doctoral student, Basileal Imana, on how Facebook serves different job ads to men and women.
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KPCC: A Totally Bananas Idea? Planting Tropical Fruit Trees To Help Fight CA Wildfires
Barath Raghavan’s work in computational agroecology to fight CA wildfires was featured
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The Register : While text-generating AI can write like humans, it lacks common sense
AI software may be able to generate text that is grammatically correct and very human-like, but when it comes to common sense they’re still lagging severely behind us humans.
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ACM: 2020 ACM Fellows Recognized for Work that Underpins Today’s Computing Innovations
Maja Matarić, Sven Koenig and Mike Zyda were recognized for “innovations that ushered in significant improvements across many areas of technology, industry and personal life”
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KNBC: Tracking LA County’s COVID-19 Cases
Cyrus Shahabi was interviewed about California’s new contact tracing app.
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Wall Street Journal: What Makes People Abuse Robots
Maja Mataric was quoted as to why people may mistreat robots.
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New York Times: Tracking Viral Misinformation About the 2020 Election
Research by Emilio Ferrara found that during the 2020 Election season 13 percent of all accounts tweeting about conspiracy theories were automated.
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Nature: The next-generation bots interfering with the US election
Research by Emilio Ferrara on how bots were influencing discussions around the upcoming election was featured.
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Venture Beat: Study identifies thousands of Twitter bots amplifying conspiracy theories ahead of the U.S. elections
Research by Emilio Ferrara on how bots are once again influencing discussions around the 2020 election was featured
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STAT News: When AI is the Opposite of Sinister
STAT quoted Yolanda Gil on a new award that recognizes the positive impact of artificial intelligence.
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Pasadena Star-News: Digital Contact Tracing Stalls Out Nationwide
Pasadena Star-News quoted Cyrus Shahabi regarding the concerns around contact tracing apps.
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CNN: Wildfire-weary Californians, ‘tired of this being normal”
CNN featured Bistra Dilkina on how people may consider moving due to the impacts of climate change.
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USC: Election 2020 Chatter on Twitter Busy with Bots and Conspiracy Theorists
New USC study finds that automated accounts and foreign interference are infesting social media conversations about the upcoming election.
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Bloomberg: Alexander Spangher Wins Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship
Spangher, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, will use the fellowship to further his work in NLP and computational journalism.
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ABC News: LA arson fires increasing amid COVID-19 pandemic
KABC-TV featured research by Crosstown, a collaboration between Viterbi and Annenberg, which found that arson fires in Los Angeles are on the rise.
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Fox 11: School district halts distance learning after ransomware attack
KTTV-TV interviewed Cliff Neuman regarding a ransomware attack affected a school district.
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CNN: Wildfire-weary Californians, ‘tired of this being normal,’ consider uprooting their lives
Computer Science Professor Bistra Dilkina, who has modeled migration patterns from sea-level rise, discusses climate-driven pressures as wildfires devastate the West Coast.
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Venture Beat : AI Tool Can Plan Collision-Free Paths for 1,000 Warehouse Robots
USC computer science researchers and Amazon Robotics explored a solution to the problem of lifelong multi-agent path finding (MAPF), where a team of agents must be moved to constantly changing goal locations without collisions.
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Digital Trends: Human Moderators Can’t Stop Online Hate Speech Alone. We Need Bots to Help
USC computer scientists developed a text classifier, which takes social media posts and predicts whether the text contains hate speech by looking at context as well as content.
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VentureBeat: How AI can empower communities and strengthen democracy
Viterbi AI research that tries to help individuals who are homeless as well as robots to identify problems in infrastructure were featured
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Crosstown: The day the traffic died in Los Angeles
Researchers at USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), including Cyrus Shahabi, IMSC director and computer science professor, worked in partnership with Crosstown, a nonprofit news organization, to examine vehicle volume data across Los Angeles during the COVID-19 shutdown.
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Adobe Spark: AthenaHacks 2020
AthenaHacks was founded in 2016 by a group of USC seniors, led by computer science student Kelly Lampotang, with the idea of creating a friendly hackathon event to inspire more women coders and engineers to work together.
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KPCC : Digital Contract Tracing to Contain the Coronavirus
As more places across California start to reopen, contact tracing is set to play a crucial role in containing the spread of the coronavirus. Cyrus Shahabi, USC computer science professor, discusses how much of the work could be done through digital contact tracing and how it would work. (Listen ~00:19).
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The World According to Namita
Namita Prakash is computer science major with a screenwriter minor
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Washington Post: Your smartphone as a weapon against Coronavirus
Cyrus Shahabi was interviewed about a contact tracing app his team is working on to fight the spread of COVID19
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Center for Cyber-Physical Systems: CCI Virtual Mini-Workshop on Digital Technologies for COVID-19
USC Researchers and faculty presented on how digital technologies– mobile applications, internet of things, data science, AI, and machine learning can play a role in understanding, monitoring and combatting COVID-19.
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Adobe Spark: 5 Scientific Achievements Accomplished Remotely
How USC Viterbi researchers innovated, disrupted, and engaged new frontiers from a distance
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DEN@Viterbi: Going the Distance: USC Viterbi Provides Distance Education During COVID-19
What Happens When All Students Become On-Line Students? Look to the Engineers.
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Memo from Dean Yortsos: Facing the COVID-19 Challenge
Please click to view PDF
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Student Advising Resources during COVID-19
Please visit page for more details
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Newsweek : Children with Autism Saw Their Learning and Social Skills Boosted After Playing with this AI Robot
USC computer science researchers who designed an artificially intelligent robot that helped children with autism boost their learning and social skills hope such technology could one day aid others with the developmental disorder.
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Robohub: Haptics and Virtual Interactions, Podcast Interview with Heather Culbertson
In this podcast, Assistant Professor in Computer Science Heather Culbertson discusses haptics research, creating interactions that realistically mimic touch sensations experienced during interactions with the physical world.
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Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Updates
Please visit sites.usc.edu/coronavirus for updates
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Deadline: Universal, Geena Davis Institute collaborate w/ USC SAIL to pilot Spellcheck for Bias tool
Tool will be deployed to support increased authentic Latinx onscreen representation and casting opportunities during the early stages of the development process
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USC News: Gift from Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg helps establish new computer science building
Support from ophthalmologist Allen Ginsburg and his wife, Charlotte, will help computer and data science programs continue their dramatic growth.
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Fast Company : This map shows where people on the coasts will flee to once sea levels rise
New AI-based research, led by Bistra Dilkina, projects migration patterns of people leaving coastal cities due to sea-level rise.
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Dow Jones Marketwatch: How AI Could Predict the Next Disaster
Bistra Dilkina was interviewed about how AI as tool could help with disaster preparation and mitigation
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BBC: Robots that Care: Making Tech that is a Force for Good
Maja Matarić was interviewed about the future for socially assistive robots as companions and coaches
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Fortune: Hair-Brushing Robot Shows How Artificial Intelligence May Help the Disabled
A team of researchers led by assistant professor of computer science Stefanos Nikolaidis have created a robotic arm capable of brushing hair, which is designed to help physically disabled people.
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Washington Post : Facebook’s ad tools subsidize partisanship, research shows. And campaigns may not even know it.
A new study co-authored by Aleksandra Korolova, an assistant professor of computer science at USC, found the technologies Facebook uses to put advertising it deems relevant in front of people may be more responsible for the polarization of American politics than previously understood.
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USC NBSE wins major awards at regional conference
Fresh from its historic win last year when they brought home the trophy for National Chapter of The Year, the USC chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, or NSBE, continues to rake awards and solidify its place as one of the best student-run organizations in the nation
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WIRED: Researchers built a simulator that teaches robots to assemble IKEA furniture
Research by Joseph Lim to train robots to assemble low-budget furniture was featured
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Fast Company: This is Your Brain on Music
Research by the SAIL lab using AI to detect music’s effects on our brains and emotions, was featured.
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NBC: Researchers Use Active Shooter Simulator to Design Safer Schools
Research by Burcin Bercerik Gerber, Gale Lucas of USC CENTIENTS and Erroll Southers to test building features that might thwart active shooters, was featured.
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Wired: If You Want a Robot to Learn Better, Be a Jerk to It
When humans give robots “tough love” by trying to knock objects out of their hands, it actually helps them find the best ways to hold things, found Stefanos Nikolaidis, a USC computer science assistant professor.
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Scientific American: Happy, with a 20 Percent Chance of Sadness
Jonathan Gratch was quoted on devices designed to predict moods.
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Wall Street Journal: How to Build Robots People Can Relate To
As robots take on bigger roles, it’s crucial that users both trust and like them, says Professor Maja Mataric, founder and director of USC’s Interaction Lab.
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Wired : Facebook’s Ad System Seems to Discriminate by Race and Gender
A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the nonprofit Upturn suggests Facebook’s ad delivery system perpetuates bias.
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India Times : Professor Creates Computational Human Hand Model
Professor Jernej Barbic shares details about his realistic computational model of the human hand in motion.
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MIT Technology Review : The world’s top deepfake artist: ‘Wow, this is developing more rapidly than I thought.’
Speaking at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference, Hao Li shares his thoughts on the future of deepfake technology.
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Information Week: Expect AI Flash Mobs of Fake News
Hao Li was quoted on the difficulty of detecting deepfake videos.
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USA Today: Check your settings if you don’t want Google tracking every move
Aleksandra Korolova was quoted on how Google can track your every move.
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The Orange County Register: Smart cars learning to avoid unpredictable pedestrians
Jeff Miller was quoted on autonomous vehicles learning to predict pedestrian movements.
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Engadget: The evolution of cognitive architecture will deliver human-like AI
Paul Rosenbloom was quoted on the current state of artificial general intelligence research.
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USC Viterbi News: The World of Games Just Got Bigger
More than 80 games from console, PC, VR, AR and mobile video games to board games and outdoor-games
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USC Viterbi News: “A Ph.D. Is Our Call to Action”
USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s 2019 Ph.D. Hooding and Awards ceremony
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OZY: How To Solve Homelessness With Artificial Intelligence
Work by CAIS using artificial intelligence to aid homeless youth in Los Angeles was featured.
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Entrepreneur: 5 Simple Job Hunting Techniques to Land Your Dream Job
Research by Kristina Lerman (and colleagues) regarding people’s email response habits was highlighted
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AI in Healthcare: AI screens for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder with 85% accuracy
Research by Chen Zhang and Laurent Itti about new technology they developed to screen children for fetal alcohol syndrome was featured.
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BBC: The new weapon in the fight against crime
Research by Pedro Szekely and colleagues to develop an algorithm that searches the internet for indicators of human trafficking was mentioned.
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Pacific Standard: Will Autonomous Vehicles Make Us Better People?
Research by Jonathan Gratch on how self-driving car technology may prompt users to consider the common good instead of selfish desires was highlighted.
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BBC: How eavesdropping on elephants is keeping them safe
An article about conserving endangered wildlife using AI, featuring projects from USC’s Center for Artificial Intelligence and Society (CAIS).
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USC News: Making a game of speech therapy for kids with cerebral palsy
A USC computer science PhD student and physical therapy researcher teamed up to develop a unique voice-assisted device that could help children with cerebral palsy.