USC Viterbi: The Real Bionic Woman. Fall 2014

FALL 2014 40

SAVING THE GARDEN OF EDEN Azzam Alwash (Ph.D. ’89) builds Iraq’s first national park

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30 SECONDS OR LESS Ted Berger and restoring memory

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SWEET EMOTION Jon Gratch gives emotions to machines

Earth’s Near Orbit Earth’s near orbit is pretty crowded — there are more than 21,000 space objects; from satellites and derelict spacecraft to the gloves, spatulas, tool bags and cameras lost by astronauts.

Here, we take a look at what resides in Earth’s near orbit, including two of USC Viterbi’s own nanosatellites.

100 KM

There are currently 1,167 operational satellites in orbit, 502 of which are from the United States.

1000 KM

The Soviet Union’s Sputnik I may have been the first artificial Earth satellite, but Vanguard I, an American satellite that launched back in 1958, is still in orbit today, making it the oldest piece of space debris.

Not much bigger than a loaf of bread, USC Viterbi’s Space Engineering Research Center (SERC)’s nanosatellite Aeneas (Greek for “praise”) was the first CubeSat (miniaturized satellite) to track a point on the surface of the Earth. It was also the first to deploy a half-meter parabolic dish, the largest deployable from a nanosatellite.

10,000 KM Caerus, named for the Greek word for “opportunity,” was USC Viterbi's first satellite subsystem, launched in 2010.

It was built to support communications for a 3-unit (or 3U) system called MAYFLOWER in a technology mission.

What is graveyard orbit? It's several hundred kilometers above synchronous orbit, where defunct satellites are moved to prevent any possible collisions.

Ever think about where your TV signal comes from? Galaxy 12, 14 and 15 are three commercial communications satellites that send digital TV signals to the East Coast. You can thank this trio for your favorite shows on ESPN and A&E.

I L LU S T R AT I O N : E R I C F R O M M E LT

CONTENTS

INTRO

1 EARTH’S NEAR ORBIT 4 DEAN’S MESSAGE: SPACE 5 POPCORN & JETPACKS

S PAC E

ARTICLES

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NAMESAKES ANDREW AND ERNA VITERBI CONTRIBUTE $10 MILLION TO USC VITERBI SCHOOL

7 ENGINEER WALKS INTO A HOSPITAL ...

USC VITERBI’S DAVID BELSON WANTS TO TAKE THE WAIT OUT OF HOSPITAL WAITING ROOMS.

BIOMEDICAL

8 SIM CITY: LA 2014 10 FACULTY ACCOLADES 10 HOW DO YOU SPOT AN INNOVATOR? 11 FEATURED FACULTY: MEGAN MCCAIN

STUDENT LIFE

12 USC RACING MEET NIKKI, THE FASTEST CAR IN TROY

13 POOLING HIS TALENTS USC VITERBI’S LUCA SPINAZZOLA.

WHAT ’S NEXT

BIOMEDICAL

14 CREATING THE MISTRESS OF ALL EVIL 15 A NEW WAY TO PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH 16 THE FUTURE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM 17 AN AIRCRAFT GRAVEYARD AIMS TO SAVE LIVES 18 THIRTY SECONDS OR LESS TED BERGER’S MICROCHIP MAY HOLD THE POWER TO RESTORE LONG-TERM MEMORY.

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USCViterbi FALL 2014

ISSN 2329-0498 Dean Yannis C. Yortsos Executive Director, Communications and Marketing Michael Chung Editor Adam Smith

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SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND CONVERGENCE ORGANIZING CHAOS

Managing Editor Marc Ballon Art Director Michelle Henry Graphic Design Friend of a Friend Contributing Writers Orli Belman, Arash Zandi Doulabi, David Haldane, Megan Hazle, Katie McKissick, Rosalie Murphy, Cassie Paton

Photography Ian Elston, John Lizvey, John McGillen, Noe Montes, Gus Ruelas Artwork Peter Bollinger, Victoria Cuthbertson, Katherine Duffy, Gregory Euclide, Eric Frommelt, Greer Freshwater Burton, Jose Hernandez, Katie McKissick, Saharat Tantivaranyoo, Huan Tran, Esther Yoon

Volume 13, Issue 2 USC Viterbi Magazine is published twice a year for the alumni and friends of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California.

Letters to the editor and comments are welcome.

Please send them to: USC Viterbi Magazine 1150 S. Olive Street, Suite 1510 Los Angeles, CA 90015

Or email them to: viterbi.communications@usc.edu OFFICE OF THE DEAN 213.740.7832 Web: viterbi.usc.edu Engineering+ Web: viterbi.usc.edu/engineeringplus OFFICE OF ADVANCEMENT 213.740.2502 Alumni Relations Web: viterbi.usc.edu/alumni

Corporate & Foundation Relations Web: viterbi.usc.edu/ corporate Development Web: viterbi.usc.edu/giving OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS & MARKETING Web: viterbi.usc.edu

FEATURES BIOMEDICAL

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THE REAL BIONIC WOMAN AFTER LOSING HER VISION FOR 30 YEARS, LISA KULIK FINDS HOPE IN THE ARGUS II, THE WORLD’S FIRST COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE DEVICE TO RESTORE SIGHT TO THE BLIND.

S PAC E

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SWEET EMOTION - JON GRATCH

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THE NEXT NEIL ARMSTRONGS IN HONOR OF ASTRONAUTICS' 10TH ANNIVERSARY, RECENT ALUMS SHARE PASSION FOR SPACE.

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SAVING THE GARDEN OF EDEN AZZAM ALWASH, PH.D. '89, RETURNED TO HIS NATIVE IRAQ TO RESTORE ITS WETLANDS—AND A WAY OF LIFE.

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ROBO BUDS

ALUMNI

S PAC E

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FROM KABUL WITH LOVE

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ANITA SENGUPTA: A QUANTUM STATE OF MIND

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IN MEMORIAM: XINRAN JI

EDITORIAL

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WE ARE AT (CYBER) WAR

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LOLZ: QUANTUM LAND

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

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MANY LIVES OF ENGINEERS

THE LAST WORD S PAC E

OFFICE OF ADMISSION AND STUDENT AFFAIRS 800.526.3347 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/admission Career Services 213.740.9677 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/careers Center for Engineering Diversity 213.740.1999 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/ced

56

Q&A: BUZZ ALDRIN, ASTRONAUT AND ENGINEER

OFFICE OF GRADUATE AND PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMS 213.740.4488 Web: gapp.usc.edu Distance Education Network Olin Hall 106 866.303.1313 Web: den.usc.edu ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering 213.740.5353 (Undergraduate)

213.740.1735 (Graduate) Web: viterbi.usc.edu/ame Astronautical Engineering 213.821.5817 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/aste Biomedical Engineering 213.740.7237 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/bme Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Web: viterbi.usc.edu/mork

Chemical Engineering 213.740.2225 Materials Science 213.740.4339 Petroleum Engineering 213.740.0332 Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering 213.740.0603 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/astani

Computer Science 213.740.4494 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/cs Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering Web: viterbi.usc.edu/hsieh

Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering 213.740.4893 Web: viterbi.usc.edu/ epstein

– Systems 213.740.4447 – Electrophysics 213.740.4700

3

INTRO

S

BOARD OF COUNCILORS Dwight J. Baum - Chair Michael Abbott Terry Adams Sonny Astani William F. Ballhaus Jr. Ronald R. Barnes Carol A. Bartz Yang Ho Cho, USC Trustee David W. Chonette Leo Chu Malcolm R. Currie, USC Life Trustee

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P A C E : BRINGING US ALL TOGETHER The late astronomer Carl Sagan, author of the celebrated series “Cosmos,” once remarked that the thickness in the vertical direction where life exists on Earth is 13 miles long. This minuscule distance, compared to other dimensions, is just remarkably small. Yet humans in the last half-century have enriched life by venturing at much larger vertical distances, both above and beyond the earth’s surface, much exceeding that distance, and enabling a much more interconnected human life. Today’s ubiquitous, instantaneous communication signals span much greater distances, the “near-earth” space. So does the ongoing revolution in cloud computing. None would have been possible without the advances inspired by the need to send and receive signals over planetary distances at the onset of space exploration several decades ago. Near-earth space is crucial to global communications, defense, the exploration and monitoring of surface and subsurface resources, and not least the environment and the climate.

From the time of the ancient astronomers, space exploration has been synonymous with the quest for the origins of the cosmos, the exaltation of the human spirit to understand human destiny, and perhaps human purpose. The origin of the Greek word for human, ανθρωπος, is to “look up,” ανω θρωσκω. Through the remarkable advances in space technology, we have been able to “look up” at the complexity and wonder of our planetary system and beyond. It is not a very distant thought that with other ongoing revolutions

Kenneth C. Dahlberg John Deininger Feng Deng Albert Dorman Daniel J. Epstein, USC Trustee Alan J. Fohrer Hester Gill Kenton Gregory Ming Hsieh, USC Trustee Jen-Hsun Huang Karl A. Jacob III Ken R. Klein, USC Trustee Harel Kodesh David A. Lane Alfred E. Mann, USC Life Trustee

in robotics and in 3-D printing, man would be able to colonize space in the very near future in ways never thought possible before.

Space has always had a strong presence in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, going back to the 1970s. More symbolically, this year marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of a separate academic home for the school's Astronautics program, one of only a few in the nation. More promising, space has always inspired young minds with the excitement of what might be possible. At USC, this spawned wonderful outside-the-curriculum projects in rocket propulsion, flight dynamics and microsatellites. Such projects, requiring elegant and precise interdisciplinary work between aerospace, astronautical, and mechanical and electrical engineering, reassure us that the future of space is in talented hands.

Also in this issue, you will find extensive coverage of the remarkable work conducted by our faculty in biomedical engineering. From restoring vision to certain blind patients through the artificial retina, to restoring long-term memory, to growing tissue on a chip, to leveraging the wealth of data informatics, biomedical engineering is ushering unparalleled advances to enhance the quality of life. Many more of these will be enabled in the very exciting, state-of-the-art new USC Michelson facility, soon to be built on the USC University Park Campus.

Gordon S. Marshall, USC Life Trustee Fariborz Maseeh Bryan B. Min John Mork, USC Trustee Donald L. Paul Stephen Poizner Debra Reed George (Ted) Scalise John F. Shea Patrick Soon-Shiong Mark A. Stevens, USC Trustee Andrew J. Viterbi, USC Trustee William Wang Jeffrey Wilcox Warner M. Williams

Jeffrey J. Woodbury Carla Mann Woods Shuguang (Alex) Xu

CORPORATE ADVISORY BOARD Steve Acevedo Joseph Aguilar Sujata Banerjee Jan Berkeley Joseph Bok Frank Chandler Jerry Charlow

usc.edu/popcornjetpacks

We know about their research, but do you know how professors and students spend their Friday nights? How they come up with new research questions? And why they became interested in engineering in the first place? Listen to the new USC Viterbi podcast “Popcorn and Jetpacks” to find out! We’ll take you behind the scenes at USC Viterbi to find out what makes our world-class researchers tick and learn about the latest groundbreaking engineering research.

Episode 1: Laughter and Autism

Episode 3: Help Me, Robot!

One of the social interactions that autism spectrum disorder affects is laughter, which is a complicated dance of sounds, cues and timing that most of us take for granted.

Professor Maja Matarić is an internationally recognized socially assistive robotics expert. In this episode, find out how Matarić sees robots fitting into our everyday lives in the near future.

Episode 2: More Lasers Andrea Armani is a powerhouse researcher, and her lab has many irons in the fire, but a few of the projects underway involve optical computing, biodetection and a wearable sensor that detects ultraviolet light exposure.

Visit USC Viterbi magazine's new digital incarnation. Find motion comics, video extras and additional stories at: magazine.viterbi.usc.edu

Sachin Chawla Tao Chen Lee Druxman Dan Eslinger Pamela Fox Dani Goldberg Arnold Hackett Gary Hafen Alan Jacobsen Sumeet Jakatdar Ken Johnson Chris Jones Shiv Joshi Ronalee Lo Mann Marija Mikic-Rakic

Nandhu Nandhakumar Christopher Seams Neil Siegel Todd Stevens Roberto Vasquez Aber Whitcomb

EMERGING LEADERS BOARD Ali Fakhari - Chairman Farzana Ansari Kameron Burk Dwipal Desai

Tracy Dooley Reed Doucette Mike Ghaffary David Hodge Justin Jameson Preethi Kasireddy Amy Lin Dara Mir Kyle Patterson Charles Ralston Paige Selby Timur Taluy Craig Western

CHINA & EAST ASIA ADVISORY BOARD Feng Deng - Chair Simon Cao Yang Ho Cho, USC Trustee Charles Chong Leo Chu Joseph Fan Chengyu Fu, USC Trustee Ming Hsieh, USC Trustee Bill Huang Kenneth Koo

Wendy Ngan Janson Shi Kevin Wei Shuguang (Alex) Xu Jeff Zhao

INDIA ADVISORY BOARD Srinath Batni - Chair Madhusudan Atre Srinivas Chinamilli Sridhar Jayanthi Ananth Krishnan

Priyanka Mittal N. R. Narayana Murthy Ranjit Nair N. Narendra Ishwardutt Parulkar Dave Ranson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw JK Srivastava Vijay Srivastava Sandeep Tandon Rajan Vasa

5

ARTICLES

Namesakes Andrew and Erna Viterbi Contribute $10 million to USC Viterbi School

With this gift, the school nears the halfway mark in its $500 million campaign.

By Marc Ballon

Erna and Andrew Viterbi

Trustee Andrew Viterbi Ph.D. ’62 and his wife, Erna, have added to their rich legacy of philanthropy at USC with a generous gift to boost scholarship in engineering and genocide studies.

The namesakes of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, the Viterbis will support two areas of the university especially important to them, designating $10 million for USC Viterbi and $5 million to USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

The couple’s gift comes as USC Viterbi celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Viterbis’ original $52 million naming gift in 2004. Their gift also provides significant support for USC Viterbi’s $500 million initiative, which aims to bolster endowment funds for faculty chairs, research, student scholarships, academic programming and capital projects.

Directed from the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, the gift will create one endowed faculty chair, four early career chairs and five graduate student fellowships at USC Viterbi.

“Andrew and Erna Viterbi stand among USC’s most ardent champions, and this generous gift reflects their long-standing commitment to investing in people,” said USC President C. L. Max Nikias.

“Through these endowments, the Viterbi School

6 Fall 2014

and Shoah Foundation can support transformative faculty and talented students, helping them to advance research that will benefit our world for generations to come. We remain deeply grateful for the Viterbis’ continued confidence.”

Andrew Viterbi co-founded Qualcomm, one of the foremost developers of wireless telecommunications products and services. He wrote the now-legendary Viterbi algorithm, which has applications in a large number of fields, including wireless and satellite communications, data recording, speech recognition and search engines.

“Over the years, my wife and I have seen the university taking enormous strides, and we want to help increase that momentum by supporting research and other academic initiatives at USC,” Viterbi said.

USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos called Andrew Viterbi an “engineering legend,” noting that Viterbi’s technology touches millions of lives. “With their latest gift, the Viterbis are reaffirming their staunch commitment to engineering education and research by helping ensure that the school is able to recruit and retain world-class faculty and students,” Yortsos said.

The Viterbis’ story embodies the spirit of Andrew’s favorite quote, Per aspera ad astra—a Latin phrase that translates to “through hardship to the

stars.” While still children, both Erna and Andrew fled Europe to the United States with their families before World War II due to growing anti-Semitism.

Seeing his parents struggle to support their family, Andrew dedicated himself to his education and won a scholarship to MIT, which sparked his interest in communications and coding theory. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the school in 1957, and he and Erna married soon after. In 1962, he earned his Ph.D. in digital communications from USC. Prior to co-founding Qualcomm, Viterbi co-founded Linkabit, a digital communications company. He also served as a professor at UCLA and then at the University of California, San Diego, where he is now an emeritus professor. At USC, he holds the Presidential Chair in Engineering and serves on USC Viterbi’s Board of Councilors. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees since 2000.

Erna Viterbi has held leadership roles at philanthropic organizations around the world, including serving on the Board of Councilors of the USC Shoah Foundation. Together with her husband, she has given generously to educational institutions, health sciences research, veterans’ causes and arts organizations. The couple resides in San Diego.

Engineer Walks Into a Hospital…

USC Viterbi’s David Belson wants to take the wait out of hospital waiting rooms.

By Marc Ballon Hospital waiting rooms. Those three words conjure up images of long lines, harried nurses, interminable waits and frustration all around.

USC Viterbi adjunct faculty member David Belson, Ph.D. ’70, understands the pain. A professor of industrial and systems engineering, he has for decades served as a hospital consultant to help rationalize operations.

“You want to keep things flowing like a river,” he said. “When there are starts and stops, things get a bit dammed up, then ‘lakes’—such as queues and crowded waiting rooms—occur.”

Belson shared suggestions for keeping those waiting rooms flowing:

04 Another advantage to using a uniform computer system is that temporary nurses and administrators filling in for sick colleagues don’t have to learn a new system whenever they work at different hospital. Instead of wasting time on computers, they could instead focus on caring for patients and moving them out of waiting rooms.

I L LU S T R AT I O N : P E T E R B O L L I N G E R

01

02

03

Nurses should put patients in adjacent exam rooms to make it easier for doctors and nurses to see them as efficiently and quickly as possibly.

Exam rooms with faster turnover could translate into shorter waiting room stays.

When a patient checks in, he or she could receive a wristband with an implanted RFID chip. If after 20 minutes the patient has yet to be seen, the wristband would automatically trigger a reminder to a nurse. That alert, Belson said, could expedite the process.

Hospital administrators waste entirely too much time having patients fill out the same forms again and again detailing their medical histories, he said. Better for all hospitals to use the same computer system so that doctors and nurses could easily and quickly access patient histories and seek only new and relevant information.

06 05 Nurses should give patients paperwork to fill out when they check in instead after they are shown to exam rooms.

Doing so would avoid bottlenecks that create delays, Belson said.

Keep it simple. All exam rooms should have identical setups, with computers, sinks and syringes all in the same place. Such standardization would make it easier for doctors and nurses to quickly find the equipment they need, and those time savings could trickle down into shorter waiting room visits.

7

ARTICLES In honor of the 25th anniversary of SimCity, Electronic Arts’ iconic computer game, we asked several distinguished USC Viterbi civil engineers to reimagine a better Los Angeles. Their visionary ideas include a floating island, flying robots, and lots and lots of alternative energy sources.

Welcome to...

Gregg Brandow Earthquake-Resistant Buildings Buildings could have flexible structural systems with damping devices to absorb the energy of an earthquake, similar to how a car has flexible springs with shock absorbers to absorb vibrations. 10

Patrick Lynett Wave Shields Buildings along the coastline could feature retractable wave shields that would rise to protect against tsunamis or big waves generated by El Niño storms. In emergencies, the shields would direct water up streets and away from buildings. 04 Floating Cities As sea levels rise, coastal cities risk underwater submersion. To prevent this, planners could create massive floating cities that would float up as the sea level rises. 07 Naturalized Beach Areas Coastal homes should have large setbacks comprised of vegetation and sand dunes. 13

George Ban-Weiss Roof Gardens Parks and gardens could top large commercial buildings to help keep buildings cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Soil adds thermal insulation. 02 A Tree on Every Corner Planners should make greater use of trees and other vegetation to shade buildings and reduce energy costs.

Trees act as an evaporative cooler for their surroundings. Native trees should be used whenever possible because they require less water than non-native varieties. 06 Solar Panels Solar panels should be used much more extensively for energy. 01 Reflective Roofs and Pavements Black and dark colors absorb heat.

Using white and light colors on roofs or colors with special pigments that reflect light in the near infrared would help keep cities cooler and cut energy costs.

8 Fall 2014

Costas Sioutas Light Rail A functional light rail network (for example, like the Gold Line that connects Pasadena to downtown L.A.) would help get people out of their cars. Train commuters are exposed to five to 10 times less carcinogenic air pollutants than freeway or surface street drivers. 05 Pedestrian Civic Centers Not only do pedestrian areas in the city center beautify the city, but they also lower population exposure to air pollutants. 09

Legend 01

Solar panels

02

Green rooftops

03 Drones scanning

for building integrity

04 Wave protection walls

Ketan Savla Smarter Stoplights Better traffic flow would reduce congestion and pollution. Stoplights that make use of real-time data could help clear traffic on busy streets by permitting longer green lights. By contrast, smaller streets would get less frequent and shorter green lights, giving priority to the busiest traffic flows. 11 Flying Robots Flying robots that fit in the palm of a hand could look for cracks in buildings and bridges, sucking up information from sensors. 03

Lucio Soibelman Carless L.A. Advanced urban planning combined with modern public transportation would encourage commuters to leave their cars at home.

Desalination Plants To help the city become self-sufficient, planners would leverage existing and develop new advanced desalination plants and other approaches. 08 Wave Power Ocean waves could generate enough power to handle all of L.A.’s energy needs. 12

05

Rail system

at 06 Trees corners

07

Floating city

08 Desalination plant 09 Central park 10

Earthquake shock-absorbing buildings

11

Smart traffic lights

12

Underwater power turbines

13

Dunes and vegetation beach buffer between city and ocean

03 02

05

01

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09 04 07

08

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I L LU S T R AT I O N : H U A N T R A N

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ARTICLES

FAC U LTY

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CCOL A DES

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02

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10

Azad Madni Lifetime Achievement Award, International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE)

Ethan Katz-Bassett

Geraldine Knatz

Iraj Ershaghi

Jonathan Gratch

Justin Haldar

Kevin Knight

Shaddin Dughmi

Paul Ronney

Burcin Becerik-Gerber

NSF Career Award

Elected to the NAE

Elected to the NAE

AAAI Fellow

NSF Career Award

AAAI Fellow

NSF Career Award

ASME Fellow

NSF Career Award

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Shang-Hua Teng

Solomon Golomb

Stephen Lu

Yannis Yortsos

Megan McCain

George Ban-Weiss

Maryam Shanechi

Nora Ayanian

Mike Chen

Simons Investigator, Simons Foundation

SIAM Fellow

OCEC President’s Award

Ellis Island Medal of Honor

MIT Technology Review’s “35 Top Innovators Under 35”

MIT Technology Review’s “35 Top Innovators Under 35”

MIT Technology Review’s “35 Top Innovators Under 35”

David Kempe Best Paper Award, ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce / EC 2014 Best Paper Award

Nerdscholar’s “40 Under 40”: Professors Who Inspire

DARPA Young Faculty Award and NSF Career Award

How Do You Spot an Innovator? Cardinal and Gold Helps.

MIT’s Technology Review’s list of the world’s “35 Innovators Under 35,” a prestigious list of technologists and scientists that has included Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, is hardly bereft of Trojans. In fact, the USC Viterbi School is in a unique category: since 2009, according to the Technology Review website, 10 of its faculty members have been selected as TR 35 young innovators—a unique distinction worldwide among full-time junior faculty.

Maryam Shanechi (2014) “Improving brain machine interface for better neuroprosthetics”

George Ban-Weiss (2014)

“Replicating the human heart on a 2.5 cm chip”

Burcin Becerik-Gerber (2012)

Hao Li (2013)

“Cutting buildings' energy use by a third.”

“Smarter animation bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds”

Jernej Barbič (2011)

Bhaskar Krishnamachari (2011) “Smarter wireless networks”

“Speeding up simulations of complex objects” Michelle Povinelli (2010)

“Predicting better photonic devices”

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Megan McCain (2014)

“Fighting climate change with greener rooftops”

Andrea Armani (2009) “Sensitive optical sensors detect single molecules”

Ellis Meng (2009) “Micropumps deliver drugs that prevent blindness”

This is your heart on chips. now, this is your heart on a chip.

Heart disease claimed nearly 600,000 lives last year.

Megan McCain’s research replicates those effects on a 2.5 cm “organ-on-chip.”

By Adam Smith

Megan McCain first saw a real human heart her junior year of college.

She held it in her hands—dark red, squishy, the size of a fist. Her first thought was, “Wow, look at the valves, these thin, delicate structures that have to open and close every second of our lives.”

Her second thought: “Wow, there’s a lot of plaques of fat. I need to stop eating French fries.”

Nine years later, McCain, now a USC Viterbi assistant professor in biomedical engineering, a self-proclaimed “cardiac tissue engineer,” is trying to re-create the human heart on a chip. Not the kind of chip that leads to arterial plaque, of course, but the kind that perfectly re-creates the cardiac cells and mechanical forces of the human heart. A slice of glass the size of a quarter, tiered with four layers, including real pumping cardiac cells and the sticky fibronectin that gives them shape. It’s not exactly a computer chip, per se, but it’s fabricated in much the same way as the 64-bit A7 chip in your iPhone.

If all goes well, these “organs-on-chip” could provide a rather dramatic testing ground for new drugs, as well as a miniature lab for personalized pharmaceutical testing.

Consider the future. Heart disease is currently public enemy No. 1 in the U.S., having claimed more American lives in 2013 than the first and second world wars combined. Imagine walking into a doctor’s office in 10 years. Before the doctor prescribes you some ACE inhibitors and a beta blocker, the medicines could be tested on your very own heart cells without ever entering your body. Using a technique of converting your own skin cells to stem cells and from there to heart cells, the newly harvested tissue might be tested in a 2.5-centimeter laboratory similar to McCain’s.

I L LU S T R AT I O N : K AT H E R I N E D U F F Y

But the potential for the pharmaceutical industry is even more astonishing. According to Forbes, 95 percent of all drugs fail in humans, proving either toxic or ineffective. It’s one reason, Forbes speculates, that the average cost of an FDA - approved drug is around $5 billion. “[With organs-on-chip] you can fail fast and fail cheap,” said McCain. “If something’s going to interact poorly in the human heart, you want to be able catch it early.”

At present, if Pfizer or Eli Lilly wants to test a new heart disease drug, they have two options: animal testing, primarily in mice, or testing cell cultures in a petri dish.

But both have obvious drawbacks. Mice may be complex biological organisms, but they’re not humans—recent studies show they're not a good predictor of what works in humans. And haphazard cell cultures in a dish aren't exactly the “home sweet home” cell architecture they might find in a working human heart.

For example, consider that human heart.

Millions of cardiac myocytes-heart muscle cells—are contracting in one glorious, simultaneous symphony. Throwing them in a petri dish allows for none of these mechanical forces, all the stretching, squishing and pulling real heart cells must respond to. McCain’s heart-on a-chip promises not only to replicate the precise horizontal alignment of myocytes — physically and electrically bound in cozy horizontal rows — but the very stiffness and shape found inside humans.

McCain likes muscles. She thinks about them as she does spin class at 6:30 in the evening. She wonders how efficiently her heart is pumping blood and whether her tiny chip can

do the same (unlike her real heart, the chip can measure that). The real human heart has lots of collagen. While at Harvard, McCain had the idea of replicating that Jell-O-like texture in her hearton-a-chip. So she started growing myocyteson soft gelatin hydrogel instead of silicone rubber.

Now the myocytes are much happier: they end up living for a month rather than a week, which is important if you want to test the longer-term effects of drugs.

“Mechanical forces,” she notes, “have not been well studied in the human heart. For example, the stiffness affects how well the myocytes contract and couple together in the heart.”

One of the big challenges of heart disease is understanding all the underlying mechanisms that cause it. According to McCain, there’s just so much happening at once: the cells are exploding in size, the heart becomes stiffer, and the rows of cells become misaligned. Which factor is most significant? McCain is hoping to model these effects individually, possibly finding new insights into therapeutic drugs.

McCain, who as a child dreamed of being a Disney animator, has long forgotten about drawing cartoon mice. But she’s still very proud of her “home movies”—beating myocytes captured at hundreds of frames a second under a fluorescent microscope.

For her, watching thousands of myocyctes beating in perfect unison, that’s as cinematic as any fantasy from Never-Never Land or King Triton’s kingdom or the 100-Acre Woods.

After all, it’s the heart at its most fundamental level.

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STUDENT LIFE

USC RACING $

60,000

M EET NI KKI , T HE FAST E ST CA R I N T R OY

Nikki

The USC racing team spent about $60,000 to build Nikki. The team’s sponsors also donated materials and services that went into Nikki’s development, including machinery.

Boeing, General Motors, Northrop Grumman, Chevron and Wells Fargo sponsor the USC racing team.

485

0-60 MPH

has a

4-cylinder Yamaha R6 engine.

pounds.

This engine was taken straight out of a motorcycle.

USC’s racing cars are built almost entirely in-house by USC students, including Jason Zide, John Baltz and Tyler Makin.

in only 3.5 seconds.

Nikki can pull

two lateral

G

which is higher than almost every supercar.

A lateral G is the sideways force that people experience while turning a vehicle.

’s

The USC racing team’s members are mainly but not exclusively USC Viterbi students. The team also has students from the Marshall School of Business and the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry.

Nikki has wireless

telemetry capability

, meaning the team can monitor a wide variety of data live from a laptop on the sidelines while the car is driving.

12 Fall 2014

NIKKI

is the name of the USC racing team's 2013-14 car. It weighs

Nikki was built in three stages between June 2013 and June 2014.

Nikki has a steering wheel that resembles that of a Formula 1 racing car. It has integrated electronic displays that let the driver know everything from speed and RPM to water temperature and oil pressure.

1 2 3

Designing

Building Testing

PHOTO: USC RACING

DAY IN THE LIFE OF LUCA 5:30 a.m. wakes up

By Greg Hardesty

5:45 - 7 a.m. weights/drilled workout at McKay Center

USC Viterbi’s Luca Spinazzola is one of the best swimmers in the world.

He’s also a full-time computer engineering and computer science major.

7- 7:45 a.m. morning swim practice

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8 a.m. breakfast at dining halls Parkside or Café ’84, where he eats as much as possible. Then he goes back to “The Fueling Station” in the McKay weight room to get protein bars, bagels and fruit to last until his next practice.

he buff blond in the black T-shirt and Hurley board shorts rolled up to the Engineering Quad on a battered black beach cruiser.

At 6 feet 4 and a muscular 210 pounds, he didn’t look like your typical USC Viterbi student. But Luca Spinazzola is, at heart, a computer science guy.

“I love finding out how stuff works,” the 21-year-old junior said.

A clue to Spinazzola’s other passion is his surfer-dude appearance.

“I just came from the Beach House,” said a tanned Spinazzola, referring to the nickname for a buddy’s pad. “It has a blow-up pool and a Slip’N Slide.”

For the All-American high school swimmer from Rhode Island whose goal is to compete in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, perhaps a real pool would be more useful.

But this was Saturday, and Spinazzola, a member of the USC men’s swim team, already had practiced that morning. He looked forward to Sunday, the only day of the week when he doesn’t hit the pool and weight room for at least three hours of grueling training.

“Swimming and being an engineering student— they’re both really hard,” said Spinazzola, whose laidback vibe belies a competitive drive both in the classroom and in the pool.

Which explains why Spinazzola, a computer engineering and computer science major, usually gets only about four and a half hours of sleep per night.

He’s hoping all the hard work pays off by qualifying for the Olympics, ideally in one of his strongest events, the 100-meter backstroke. But he’s also angling for a career in computer engineering.

“I don’t think I want to just swim [forever],” Spinazzola said.

Growing up, however, swimming was his world— as it was for his three siblings, Chiara, 23, and twins Angelica and Bianca, 19. All enjoyed great success in the sport. Spinazzola started hitting the pool at age 6 in his hometown of Narragansett, Rhode Island, whose population of about 16,000 swells to more than twice that in the summer as tourists flock to its beaches.

He started ranking high in races beginning at age

PHOTO: JOHN MCGILLEN

8 and swam for various club teams through his early teens. In high school, Spinazzola set several state records. He was that rare swimmer who excelled at shorter races like the 100-meter backstroke as well as the longer events.

Swimming for the Trojans, Spinazzola only has gotten better. In March, at the NCCA National Championships, Spinazzola swam a 45.13 in the 100-yard backstroke, more than 3 seconds faster than his time in high school—and a record for USC. The time made him the 18th fastest of all time for that event and the 16th-fastest American. The American record is 44.07.

Spinazzola credits his improved swimming in part to getting in better shape. He has put on more than 25 pounds of mostly muscle since freshman year.

“I wouldn’t be swimming if I didn’t want to be the best,” he said.

As for his studies, Spinazzola is pulling down an upper-division GPA of 3.43.

Ted Faber, a computer scientist and instructor at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute, noted that Spinazzola “works really, really hard. He’s a very motivated and diligent student.”

After his Slip’N Slide session, Spinazzola planned to turn his attention to an assignment about adding functionality to a computer operating system. Then he had to get cracking on a group project for an upper-division business school writing class.

When he does find some free time, Spinazzola likes to surf, a sport he learned growing up in Rhode Island.

“I have to bug my friends to borrow a car since I don’t have one,” said Spinazzola, whose old beach cruiser has a rusty chain and worn-out handgrips.

As USC, Spinazzola gives high marks to the academic program and professors. “You definitely learn a lot here,” he said.

The dual-nationality Spinazzola said he may swim for Italy, his father’s homeland, if he qualifies for the Olympics.

“The U.S. has the best swimmers in the world,” he said. “I would love to swim for the U.S., but I don’t know. I just want to compete in the Games. And I have one shot to make it.”

8:30 a.m. – 2 p.m. classes. “Even if I don’t have a lot of classes I rarely go home. I’ll just stay at McKay and go to the study rooms and do work. I rarely do not have work to do. This usually results in me falling asleep with my face in my books before I am awake enough to be productive again.”

2 - 4 p.m. afternoon swim practice 4 - 5 p.m. eats a full late lunch/early dinner, usually at the dining halls 5 – 9 p.m. either goes home or back to McKay to study and get more work done 9 p.m. eats a second dinner 10 p.m. - 1 a.m. or later does more work/studies until he falls asleep. then he does it all again the next day...

Fun fact: According to a recent medical scan, Luca needs to consume 2,200 calories a day while doing absolutely nothing not to lose weight.

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WHAT'S NEXT

CR EAT ING THE M IST R ESS OF ALL EVIL

By Katie McKissick We all know she put a curse on Princess Aurora, but do we know why? Maleficent comes to us 55 years after the Disney animated classic Sleeping Beauty, and it explores the origins of the Mistress of All Evil and why she came to put a curse on a little blonde baby.

Making this film about one of the most iconic storybook villains involved not just a cast of talented actors and visual effects wizards from Digital Domain and Moving Picture Company (MPC), but also USC Viterbi Professor Paul Debevec from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Debevec and colleagues Tim Hawkins, John Monos and Mark Sagar have been recognized with Scientific & Engineering Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the digital actor technology used on Spider-Man 2, Superman Returns, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Hancock, and Debevec’s lab scanned numerous actors to help Weta Digital create the Na’vi characters featured in Avatar. He and his team used the Light Stage housed at ICT to take high-resolution scans of the cast of Maleficent to create the eponymous character as well as the pixies Knotgrass, Thistlewit and Flittle.

For the computer-generated pixies, Debevec and his team scanned actresses Lesley Manville, Imelda Staunton and Juno Temple on the Light Stage with their hair pulled back in a headband and little to no makeup so that the 3-meter-wide sphere of 4,000 computer-controlled LEDs and seven cameras could capture every detail of their faces—every pore, freckle and wrinkle.

But the Light Stage data wasn’t used just for facial skin detail; it also captured data to make blood flow maps and light fields. When you squeeze your eyes tightly shut, purse your lips and wrinkle your nose for a few seconds, blood squeezes out of the area around your lips, and blood collects in your cheeks, making them flush.

The Light Stage captured the effects of blood flow for each actress to add yet another level of realism to their computer-generated characters.

To record that data, the actresses held various extreme expressions in the Light Stage for approximately five seconds, then relaxed their faces.

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Angelina Jolie on the set of Maleficent.

Actress Imelda Staunton in the Light Stage at ICT.

To create light fields for each character, actors The team ushered Jolie to the stage and closed were filmed while LEDs flashed one at a time over the door to seal her into the geodesic sphere of their faces, recording the effects of light striking LEDs. “Watching the light play off of an actor’s the face at different angles. This data can be used face in the Light Stage is always an interesting to create a realistic lighting effect so it looks like visual, and with Angelina Jolie in makeup as Mathat character is really in the room, with the light leficent, it was a remarkable sight,” Debevec said. falling on her face naturally.

The visual effects team at Digital Domain used And then, of course, there is Maleficent herself. the Light Stage data to create a realistic digital Played by Angelina Jolie, Maleficent isn’t a comdouble that was used for stunts that were not puter-generated character like the flower pixies. physically possible or too dangerous to attempt.

Jolie did the vast majority of her own stunts, flying “What we’re trying to do here is bring the esthrough the air on rigs in full costume. But there sence of the actor’s performance to the screen,” were still points in the film where the team from said Darren Hendler, the digital effects supervisor visual effects company Digital Domain needed at Digital Domain. “Not to invent, not to create what they call a digital double, or digidouble, for something new, but to rethe actress. create the actor’s perforThe scans Debevec did "WE’RE GETTING TO THE STAGE mance capturing all those on the Light Stage at ICT for subtleties and nuances.”

WHERE WE CAN MIMIC AND Jolie were notably different Hendler and his team think from the scans for the pixies. CREATE 100 PERCENT PHOTO-REAL of these new technological Jolie was in full costume, capabilities as digital prosthetVERSIONS OF THE ACTOR." makeup and prosthetics. ics, not so much as a tool to “Working with Angelina Jolie on Maleficent create characters from nothing. At every step in was exciting, and one of the most prominent the production process—animating, rendering and actors we’ve worked with, alongside Tom Cruise, touching up the characters and special effects—it Will Smith and Charlize Theron,” Debevec said. all goes back to the performance of the cast.

“When it was time for Angelina to come to the “We’re getting to the stage where we can lab where we have the Light Stage, she looked mimic and create 100 percent photo-real verso impressive that people were speechless. She sions of the actor,” said Hendler, “but without walked in the room, past eight or 10 people that actor’s actual performance, body, face, frozen in their tracks, directly up to me, without expressions, it’s nothing.” anyone taking action to make introductions. ‘So, you must be Angelina?’ I managed, looking into the green eyes of one of the best known faces on earth.”

C O U R T E S Y : D I G I TA L D O M A I N / WA LT D I S N E Y P I C T U R E S

A NEW WAY TO PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH USC Viterbi computer scientists create a virtual audience for public speaking training.

By Orli Belman contact, we might have an Even for the greatest orators, audience member clear a polished performance rehis or her throat to get the quires practice and feedback. presenter’s attention.”

But sharpening a speech The team is currently in front of a crowd or even conducting a study with a close friend can induce 60 people who each give a anxiety in almost anyone, presentation. Some people and even for those interested get no feedback, while othin rehearsing in front of real ers receive feedback in the people, a willing group is not form of green or red color always available. bars that indicate levels Enter Cicero, an interacof audience engagement. tive virtual audience solution A third group gets their being developed by researchfeedback from an interacers at the USC Institute for tive virtual audience. After Creative Technologies (ICT) receiving feedback (or not), and the USC Viterbi School of Cicero aims to create expert public speakers in the tradition of the famous Roman orator. each person presents again.

Engineering. Named for the After a comparison, the Roman rhetorician, Cicero team hopes to determine which form of feedback “These are all measurable factors that go into combines machine learning models and Toastis most effective. determining whether a performance is effective masters tips to automatically evaluate a person’s Aside from helping to improve speechmakor not,” Morency said. “People make these calcudelivery and provide constructive critiques for ers’ skills, this phase of the Cicero study aims to lations automatically, and what we discovered is improvement. advance ICT’s existing research on developing that computers can be taught to do the same.”

“We’ve all had the experience practicing a interactive virtual humans, including improving In results presented last year at the International presentation in front of mirrors or empty chairs,” how these characters move, listen, react and perConference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, the resaid Stefan Scherer, co-leader of this effort and ceive as they communicate with real people. The searchers reported that the initial Cicero prototype research assistant professor at ICT and the USC researchers are also using this project to better recognized properties of effective speeches, includViterbi Department of Computer Science. “But in understand how to implement effective coming strong voice quality, eye contact and gesturing, order to get better, you need audience feedputer-delivered instruction, provide automatic nearly as accurately as trained Toastmasters who back, including nonverbal signals like nodding assessments and model individualized behaviors had volunteered to appraise the talks. heads or downcast eyes that tell you if you are for diverse groups of virtual humans.

The evaluative engine driving Cicero is Multidoing well or not. The goal of this project is to ICT has long specialized in training systems to Sense. Developed by ICT research programmer give people that feedback before it’s too late.” improve interpersonal skills. Cicero is sponGiota Stratou, MultiSense can instantly quantify To begin that process, Scherer and project sored in part by the U.S. Army to encourage facial expressions, posture and speech patterns. co-leader Louis-Philippe Morency, director of ICT’s the development of leaders who are confident The framework, combined with simple cameras, MultiComp Lab and a research assistant professor speaking in front of a crowd. The National Science microphones and a Microsoft Kinect sensor, can in the Department of Computer Science, made a Foundation also provides funding. The team sees automatically analyze people’s gestures, voices, science out of studying public speaking, compiling other potential applications that can improve eye contact and facial expressions to provide what characteristics studies and expert elocuhow people present themselves and inform intelligent feedback that helps them improve their tionists have determined will put an audience on future human-computer interaction research, like performances in public speaking. the edge of their chairs and what will send them preparing politicians for press conferences or job In SimSensei, another ICT research project, slumping in their seats. candidates for group interviews.

MultiSense automatically assesses nonverbal Next, they brought in study subjects who gave If Morency and Scherer succeed in making behaviors associated with depression and allows a speeches in front of a static virtual audience. Reit easier for people across professions to more virtual interviewer to respond appropriately. searchers recorded their performances, tracking clearly get their points across, even the most In the case of Cicero, the researchers’ next components of the presenters’ speech, gaze and apprehensive of announcers might be prompted challenge is to combine MultiSense and Smartbody movement, and measuring and monitoring to propose a toast.

Body, a character animation system overseen by over 20 nonverbal characteristics associated with But, the researchers caution, practice, ICT research scientist and Cicero co-investigator good or bad speaking performances. whether with a virtual audience or a real one, is Ari Shapiro. SmartBody determines individualThe focus was on style, not substance. The not the only factor when it comes to delivering a ized feedback behaviors for each member of the team did not address the content of what people crowd-pleasing presentation. virtual audience—behaviors that are driven by the said—that aspect might be added later—but “People project more confidence when they practice performance and informed by learning rather looked and listened for the way in which are enthusiastic about the message they want to strategies designed to effect positive change. the speech was delivered. Were voices monotone deliver,” said Scherer. “There may be people who “We are realizing we don’t need to model or did inflections change? Did people speak in a have plenty of training but they don’t believe in everything a real audience would do,” said breathy whisper or with a strong timbre? Did they what they are saying.”

Morency. “Rather than have a virtual listener make the most of the space on the stage, direct And that may be the most valuable feedback of all. quietly fall asleep, we might have them shift their eyes to specific people, wave their arms or their body and cough to signal to the speaker clasp their hands? that people seem bored. If a speaker avoids eye

I L LU S T R AT I O N : V I C TO R I A C U T H B E R T S O N

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WHAT'S NEXT

THE FUTURE OF CITIZEN JOURNALISM

By Marc Ballon

With the 24/7 news cycle moving faster than ever, media companies have developed an insatiable appetite for compelling real-time content. In their quest to attract viewers, CBS, Fox News, CNN and other organizations compete as never before for dramatic breaking news footage, ranging from the devastation wrought by Asian tsunamis to school shootings in the Heartland to fatal textile factory fires in Bangladesh.

Ironically, this growing hunger for breaking news comes at a time when many organizations have shuttered domestic and international bureaus to shave costs. To fill that void, media companies have increasingly relied on citizen-journalists who provide cellphone videos and pictures as events unfold. Yet these homemade submissions take time to sort, view and verify, and often lack key details such as the exact time and place they were shot.

MediaQ could provide these organizations with an invaluable tool to greatly expand the breadth and depth of their coverage.

The USC-created online media management

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framework would allow organizations to send out requests to would-be reporters to gather footage of protests, fires, riots and other breaking news.

Using MediaQ’s mobile app, citizen-journalists could upload content to the platform’s server.

All user-generated media would be automatically tagged with information such as when and where it was recorded and the camera’s direction, according to Seon Ho Kim, M.S. ’94, Ph.D. ’99, the project’s lead researcher and an associate director at USC Viterbi's Integrated Media Systems Center.

Location coordinates are acquired from embedded GPS receiver sensors in mobile devices, while digital compasses and accelerometer sensors capture camera orientation.

MediaQ could also ascertain whether any people appear in the uploaded content and even extract building or place names, to make it “far easier [for TV news producers and documentarians] to browse and search for videos and images,” Kim said.

Its potential is such that universities in Germany, China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong

and Saudi Arabia plan to release the system to their students for research and other purposes. If the beta testing performs as expected, Kim said, MediaQ could hit the market by year’s end.

The project, which has been in development since 2010 and has received funding from the National Science Foundation and Google, has already made a high-profile debut.

In January 2013, PBS NewsHour teamed up with MediaQ to create an “InaugBlog” for President Obama’s second inauguration. Using MediaQ, “15 rising stars in college journalism” uploaded videos and pictures to the InaugBlog website to create a rich multimedia experience of the historic proceedings, according to PBS. “I think it makes good on the promise of what we call citizen-journalism,” said Gabriel Kahn, a former Wall Street Journal deputy bureau chief in Hong Kong and in Southern Europe who now oversees the Future of Journalism project at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab. “I think MediaQ has the potential to help improve the way news organizations cover the news.”

I L LU S T R AT I O N : M I C H E L L E H E N RY

AN AIRCRAFT G R AV E YA R D AIMS TO SAVE LIVES

Exploring USC Viterbi’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Lab.

By Rosalie Murphy

Skeletons of old airplanes fill an unmarked warehouse outside downtown L.A. Some are ashy, charred by flames from exploding engines. Others show walls of crunched metal where pilots used to sit. An old U.S. Border Patrol helicopter still litters the ground with dust from El Paso, Texas, where it crashed a few years ago.

This aircraft graveyard holds wreckage from eight crashes in the past five years—and important clues about what happened.

“There are approximately 1,500 accidents every year in the U.S. They’re seldom big aircraft, but there might be damage, there might be injury, there might be death,” said Thomas Anthony, director of the USC Aviation Safety and Security Program. “There are 1,500 incidents with insurance companies, lawyers, pilots, claimants. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

Students come from the world over to study Aircraft Accident Investigation, a course in the program. Most of these professionals work in the aerospace industry—as pilots, managers, government officials or military officers—but few have actually encountered accidents.

So, after a week of classroom lectures, they arrive at their first scene—laid out on the concrete floor of USC Viterbi’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Lab. “Approach the wreckage and take it in, in its totality,” Anthony coaches. “You don’t want to focus in on the wreckage if there’s a line of trees a hundred yards away and the tops of the trees are gone. Say to yourself, ‘What am I noticing? What stands out?’”

Usually students work in small groups on any of the lab’s wrecks, which are donated by insurance companies or governments after a formal investigation is complete. Students study models of the plane and look at pictures of the accident site before continuing.

“We have people from every walk of aviation and transportation life,” Anthony said. “The pilots will go here and look at the cockpit and say, ‘Ah, look at the altimeter, it’s stuck at this, and look at the position of the throttles.’ The mechanics or manufacturers, they might say, ‘Let’s take a look at that jack screw and see where the position was.’

You allow the wreckage to speak to you. If there was a fire, what are you noticing besides the fire?

You just collect it. You allow your undirected perceptions to guide you.”

One crash site features two private aircraft.

PHOTOS: NOE MONTES

One has a red stripe; the other, blue. The planes collided over the Catalina Channel. Daniel Scalese ’11, who manages the accident investigation lab, explained how students will use the wreckage.

“Students will see, hopefully, that here, there’s a little bit of blue paint. This aircraft did not have any blue paint, and the blue paint is in the area that clearly absorbed the impact,” Scalese said. “And that plane left some of the mud from the tire on there.”

Professionals from Nigeria, Norway, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere participate in the aircraft investigation lab during six annual course offerings. Most are in the middle of their careers in government, corporate, manufacturing or operations. A handful represent NGOs like the United Nations World Food Programme, which often flies to places without working airports.

Aircraft Accident Investigation is one of 23 courses offered by USC’s Aviation Safety and Security Program, which was founded in 1953 to train military officers. Now, students can take combinations of courses for certificates in Aviation Safety and Security and in Systems Safety.

“At USC’s program, there was such a wide breadth of experience and ideas, and I came away with information that I’m putting to use every day in my job,” said Greg Calvert, who completed the Aircraft Safety and Security certificate program this year. Calvert, an Army veteran, oversees risk management and security at Atlantic Coast Aircraft Services in Pennsylvania.

As the company develops a new fleet of aircraft, Calvert has been tasked with writing its safety manuals.

“I’ve been able to take a lot of the new ideas in the industry and bring them into our system while we write our manuals and establish our procedures,” Calvert said.

Calvert hasn’t had to investigate any accidents in his current job yet. But by implementing the practices he learned from teachers and peers at the investigation lab, his organization might prevent a few.

“The goal is to ID incidents and hazards and fix them before they happen,” Anthony said.

“Looking at accidents is quite emotional when you can relate to it. It has the fixing power of establishing the learning they do in the classroom.”

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THIRTY SECONDS OR LESS For people with Alzheimer’s, stroke and dementia, the world, like a stopwatch, is reset roughly every 30 seconds. Ted Berger’s microchip may hold the power to change this and restore long-term memory.

By Adam Smith

Every afternoon, Merril Benes watches The Ellen DeGeneres Show. She loves Ellen’s silliness, her dancing. When Ellen introduces a guest, Leonardo DiCaprio, she laughs at their banter.

About 30 seconds later, Benes has no idea who Leonardo DiCaprio is.

She hasn’t spoken a complete sentence in nearly a year. Mostly, she just giggles.

Benes, a woman who used to be a multitasking Jedi for the president of a large corporation, can no longer remember how to dress herself. How to find the guest room in her 2,800-square-foot house. Even how to bathe.

She used to love books, especially romance novels by Danielle Steel. But if she read the opening sentences of Season of Passion, it might go something like this:

“The alarm went off just after six.

She stirred, reached an arm out from under the covers, and turned it off.

She could still pretend that she hadn’t heard it.”

By the time Benes has gotten to “she could still pretend,” she’s already forgotten about the alarm clock and the rather annoyed woman turning it off.

Although she can still remember what a car is and who her husband, Cary, is—both long embedded in her neural pathways—Benes cannot create

18 Fall 2014

new long-term memories. Diagnosed six years ago with Alzheimer’s at age 55, she has an estimated three to five years left to live. So she takes her Aricept and Namenda, participates in once-amonth clinical drug trials at USC’s Alzheimer Disease Research Center (ADRC), takes day trips with her six-day-a-week, live-in caregiver, Lorraine, and largely waits for the inevitable.

Short-term memory resides in the brain for about 20 to 30 seconds. From there, it must be converted into the electrical-chemical language of long-term memory, or it is lost and never retained.

For Benes, her hippocampus—the part of the brain responsible for that long-term memory conversion—hasn’t properly done its job. Like a damaged circuit, the sequence of “talking” neurons gets no further.

Stepping into that breach is USC Viterbi Professor Ted Berger, who, like Inspector Morse in his favorite detective fiction, has been assembling the puzzle of the human brain for the past 25 years.

Berger, biomedical engineer and neuroscientist, has an audacious plan to bypass the damaged brain circuitry in Alzheimer’s patients like Benes.

A VSLI memory chip, or cognitive prosthetic, embedded under the skin at the crown of the skull, would essentially mimic the function of the Alzheimer’s-ravaged hippocampus. MIT Technology Review named it one of the “top 10 breakthrough technologies” of 2013.

Imagine a scenario in which Benes is meeting

her neurologist for the first time in six months: Neurologist: Hi, Merril, my name is Dr. Chui.

I’ll be asking you a few questions.

The sensory information from Benes’ eyes, ears, nose and fingertips all send electrical pulses up to the brain. They make their way into the entorhinal cortex, the doorstep of the hippocampus, and the place where Alzheimer’s often makes its initial beachhead. From here, the signals begin to consolidate in a region of the hippocampus known as CA3.

In a normally functioning brain, the neural code for Benes’ memory would pass through the curve of the hippocampus, beginning in the CA3 region as nearly coded long-term memory before exiting CA1 as final coded long-term memory. But today, because of either trauma or disease-related damage ahead, a detour is needed.

It is here in CA3 that neurons would be recorded by 32 ceramic electrodes and sent to a 6 millimeter-by-6 millimeter microchip. The chip, embedded with mathematical models created by USC Viterbi Research Associate Professor Dong Song and Professor Vasilis Marmarelis, would then mimic the hippocampus, translating the code into final long-term memory. Where are the consolidated memories stored from there? That part is still unknown. “That’s a Nobel Prize-winning question,” Berger smiles.

In this scenario, the next time Merril met with Dr. Chui, she should be able to retrieve the newly

I L LU S T R AT I O N : E S T H E R YO O N

coded long-term memory of their previous meeting. People with Alzheimer’s, dementia and stroke would be able to create long-term memories that might lead to a more manageable life: remembering how to dress themselves, bathe, find the bathroom, identify caregivers and—if they’re especially lucky—even read novels by Danielle Steel.

Ted Berger’s first memory is one of loss. He remembers being 2 years old, playing with a toy gas station in Lafayette, Indiana. There was a garage section to park the cars, an elevator to lift them to a second level, even a curved ramp that the cars could run down. His father, Arvid, an electrical engineering student at Purdue University, had just taken a job at IBM and the family was moving to New York’s Hudson Valley. “The toy got left behind,” Berger said. “There wasn’t enough room in the car.”

To be clear, the memory prosthetic he is working on would not be able to restore memories like this once lost. “It won’t help you remember the name of your fourth-grade teacher if you’ve forgotten it,” Berger laughed. But for someone like his mother, Marian, whose hippocampus was damaged by stroke and who died in 2005, it might have allowed her to, say, recognize her speech therapist upon entering the room.

For now, human trials with the memory chip are still a couple years away, but Berger has already seen great success with rats and primates.

In June 2011, for example, Berger, working with his colleague, Sam Deadwyler of Wake Forest University, proved they could literally turn memory on and off at the flip of a switch. Laboratory rats, taught to respond to a sequence of levers, had their memories blocked by a drug called MK801. Unlike Merril Benes, the rats have a short-term memory of five to 10 seconds. But when the memory signal was turned on from a nearby computer, the animals remembered. In addition, the researchers demonstrated that in a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually enhance the memory capability of rats.

The second huge moment came in September 2012, when Berger and Deadwyler successfully tested the brain implant in monkeys. A couple dozen rhesus monkeys playing a picture-matching game had their memories impaired by similar pharmacological agents. Their performance fell by

20 percent. But once the memory signal was activated, the monkeys did even better than normal.

The key in both cases was the ability to record and identify specific memories—i.e., what specific neurons, firing electrical pulses to each other at what specific intervals, create the code for “push this lever for water” or “this toy is the correct match.”

Once recorded and identified, Berger can essentially create “artificial memories”: based on the inputs, the neural code flowing in from the CA3 region, the microchip can predict what that output would have been (if the hippocampus had been functioning) and speak the language fluently enough to fool the rest of the brain.

The brain has its own language, and timing appears to be anything. For example, when Benes sees her doctor, there are probably 10,000 neurons in her brain assigned to the task of describing what she looks like. The individual neurons can’t do much—after all, we kill a couple thousand of them over a good martini lunch—but when they get together as a group, that’s when the action happens.

Neurons fire electrical pulses at each other called action potentials. These action potentials, or “spikes,” are a short explosion of electrical activity that lasts for milliseconds. But the information, the real memory information, is not carried in the pulses themselves, which are nearly identical.

Just as Claude Debussy once said, “Music is the space between the notes,” perhaps memory may be best described as the space between the pulses.

For a huge music fan like Berger, who saw the Who smash their guitars and amplifiers at 5 a.m. during Woodstock, there’s a certain poetry in that.

“The biggest success is understanding the approach to the problem,” he said. “More work will be required, but the path has been laid down. It’s been discovered. If we can predict CA1 outputs for a wide range of CA3 inputs, we have begun to learn the language of the brain underlying memory.

Now, we still don’t know exactly what all the content of the language is yet. But we can make pretty good predictions.”

For Merril Benes and others like her, even limited restoration of the ability to form long-term memories could yield dramatic effects. As her hus-

Ted Berger, the David Packard Chair of Engineering, has been named among Foreign Policy magazine's "Top 100 Global Thinkers" for his working developing a neural prosthetic for memory.

band, Cary, says, Benes “hasn’t been alone for five minutes in two years. … She couldn’t dial 911 if she needed to. If she’s taking a shower, she can’t adjust the water or remember to go beyond just rubbing her left arm with a washcloth for five minutes.”

Without a functioning hippocampus, that stopwatch is ruthless. Roughly every 30 seconds, short-term memories come to die. And for Benes, even the previously ingrained long-term memories, the ones that predated Alzheimer’s, are beginning to fade rapidly.

Berger knew that the technology would come too late for his own mother, but he has high hopes that just like the cochlear implant and the artificial retina before him, this will be the next big breakthrough in prosthetics for the human brain. The only difference is that unlike a cochlear implant or artificial retina, which involve a one-way communication (sending light or vibration into the human brain), this involves a real dialogue. The brain chip would need to both receive short-term memory code and export it as long-term memory code for storage elsewhere in the brain.

“No one’s ever done this before,” Berger said.

“When you look at the reality of it, it’s frightening.

[But] when you look at all those neurons and all those action potentials streaming out for even the simplest memory, if the brain can do it, we should be able to do it. In the end, we’re only looking at ourselves.”

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WHAT'S NEXT

SCIENCE,ENGINEERING AND CONVERGENCE The USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience will help develop new medical devices and ways to detect and cure diseases.

In January, retired orthopaedic spinal surgeon and inventor Gary K. Michelson and his wife, Alya, donated $50 million to create the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, which will bring together biologists, engineers, computer scientists and others to come up with novel medical devices and treatments.

Michelson, a prolific inventor who holds more than 950 patents and pending applications throughout the world, has made it his personal mission to merge engineering and science to spur medical breakthroughs.

He spoke with USC Viterbi Managing Editor Marc Ballon about his gift and its meaning.

A Bridge To The Future Embodying the vision of retired orthopaedic spinal surgeon Gary K. Michelson and his wife, Alya, the Michelson Center will reflect USC’s commitment to interdisciplinary learning and research to advance knowledge and science. The building, which will be completed in 2017, also represents a powerful collaboration between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Among the center’s first residents will be Scott Fraser, a world leader in microscopic imaging.

The Provost Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering joined USC in 2012 from the California Institute of Technology, where he founded the Biological Imaging Center in the Beckman Institute. Fraser holds joint appointments in USC Viterbi and Dornsife.

Alya and Gary Michelson

Why did you decide to give to USC? They’re brilliant people. They had a vision for doing science that was 100 percent consistent with the beliefs that I’ve held for most of my adult life.

Universities have been notorious for the purity of scientific research, and from the inside looking out, they take pride in doing science for science’s sake. They shouldn’t be ivory towers. We need to do science for a greater purpose—like humanity’s sake. Do science with an eye to how it manifests in the real world.

Why are you such a proponent of engineering?

If you were a male 20 years ago and you had

20 Fall 2014

prostate cancer, you’d be messed up your whole life. Now there are robots that enucleate out the prostate while leaving the nerves intact.

My interest in engineering isn’t how to build a bridge that’s better. My interest is how it intersects with medicine to produce medical breakthroughs.

That’s what we’re going to do in the center.

What is the importance of convergence?

If you look at physicians, 100 years ago they were expected to be everything: surgeon, OB, general practitioner. Fifty years ago, we had surgeons and OBs and some degree of specialization. Today, people aren’t even orthopaedic surgeons—you’re a hand surgeon or a trauma specialist—because the

amount of information to be mastered is increasing. You can be a master, but you have to be a master of an ever-shrinking subsection of a scientific specialty.

Then the question becomes, how does an electrical engineer talk to a molecular biologist? They can’t. They don’t even speak the same language.

If there was ever a need to induce convergence, this is it. This is the real problem in science today.

If you look at the artificial retina, developed in part by doctors at USC, it required ophthalmologists and electrical engineers and computational sciences and biologists. It’s a convergent product.

So I think the issue is getting all these brilliant masters of their own subspecialized fields of science to work together convergently to solve real-world problems.

PHOTO: JOHN LIVZEY PHOTOGRAPHY

ORGANIZING CHAOS

A $10 million grant from NIH funds a much-needed craniofacial research database.

By Cassie Paton

Scott Fraser

Carl Kesselman

Yang Chai

Provost Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Professor, Epstein Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering Fellow, Information Sciences Institute

Professor of Craniofacial Molecular Biology

What if scientific data was as easy to share and organize as iPhoto? That's what happens when an imaging expert, a craniofacial doctor and "the father of grid computing" all converge.

Data is essential to the work scientists and researchers do every day, but organized haphazardly, navigating it can be cumbersome at best, dysfunctional at worst.

But with a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute Fellow Carl Kesselman and his team have come up with ways of making scientific data easy to upload, organize, share and—perhaps most importantly—navigate.

The FaceBase grant from NIH is aimed at advancing craniofacial research by coming up with ways to better organize datasets on development and deformities in the face and brain so doctors, surgeons and researchers can easily access and study the information.

Kesselman has created one such solution with a database for information like gene expressions of molecules and tissues, as well as other aspects of how the face forms, with an easy-to-navigate labeling and organizing system he likens to iPhoto.

Kesselman’s team is the hub that interacts with about a dozen spoke projects from universities across the country that provide data to the platform, Craniofacial Central.

“Scientists can spend up to half their time just trying to move their data and around and figure out what they have and keep track of it,” Kesselman said. “We want to make searching for data as easy as it is to get pictures off your smartphone to share, organize and access them.”

USC Dornsife and Viterbi’s Translation Imaging Center Director Scott Fraser worked alongside Kesselman to secure the grant, seeing an opportunity to address a big problem.

“I have friends in the legal business, and every once in a while they’ll archive huge boxes of file folders and I wonder, Will anyone ever open those boxes again?” Fraser said. “Imagine that was scientific data that no one knows how to find or interact with. The last thing you want to do is go through it page by page to find what you want.”

Fraser’s lab builds powerful microscopes that can capture images of facial cell formation much deeper and faster than such instruments could even just a few years ago, which is hugely beneficial to craniofacial research but poses challenges as well.

“As imaging techniques have gotten better, we have this exploding ability to collect data,” Fraser said. “And our ability to analyze or interact with that data hasn’t kept pace.”

Until now. With the Craniofacial Central database, Fraser has a whole new infrastructure for working with the data he’s collected. And he finds collaborating with others on the information that much easier.

“Those tools will impact so many researchers and allow us to better understand the data we’re collecting, and I think will be generalized to other fields as well,” Fraser said.

The dental field in particular will see huge

benefits. Yang Chai, director of the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology and associate dean of research at the Ostrow School of Dentistry, advises Kesselman on the hub and oversees one of the hub’s contributing spoke projects.

Chai’s team works on craniofacial development and examines birth defects like cleft palates.

Chai said the hub “will not only impact what craniofacial researchers do, but will set us apart as a model for others to follow in research for the kidney and brain.”

By bringing together the USC Viterbi, USC Dornsife and USC Ostrow schools, Kesselman said they can tackle different aspects of problems in craniofacial research in ways that wouldn’t be possible in many institutions.

“My interest is in finding new and innovative ways that information technology and informatics can be used to advance science,” Kesselman said. “FaceBase is an example of a really wonderful application where we can work very closely with this research community on problems. And if solutions are found, they can radically improve people’s lives.”

And many are enthusiastic.

“It’s an amazing Viterbi success story,” Fraser said. “Carl is creating tools that are making a big impact in biology and biomedical work, and I think he’s going to take over the world.”

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22 Fall 2014

PHOTO: NOE MONTES

After losing her vision for 30 years, Lisa Kulik finds hope in the Argus II, the world’s first commercially available device to restore sight to the blind.

By Adam Smith

When Lisa and Ed Kulik graduated Hollywood High School in 1977, Lindsay Wagner was America’s only “Bionic Woman.”

Thirty-seven years later, bionic women aren’t relegated to Wednesdays on ABC. In fact, in Ed’s case, he may have married one.

They were strangers in high school, and likely would have remained that way if some guy hadn’t shoved a fish into his pocket. Witness the scene: Two years after graduation, Lisa and Ed were at a party in the Hollywood Hills. Ed was a young marine, recently returned from Camp Pendleton. He drove a red ’68 Camaro, but he preferred his previous ride: “deuce and a half with a 50-caliber machine gun.” Lisa was a happy-go-lucky veterinary technician.

At the party, one of their former classmates, “Crazy Larry,” had also taken a keen interest in the animal kingdom. Reaching into a fish tank, he deposited a hapless goldfish into his pocket. He turned to Lisa and Ed: “Wanna see my fish?”

It was not a high point in the annals of ichthyology, but as parties go it was a decent icebreaker.

They both laughed over it.

Two years later they were married. Twenty-one was a big year for Lisa: marriage, baby Joey on the way— and the first time she learned about a strange “night blindness” and spots on her retina. It would be five more years before she would be formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

Over the next 30 years, like fragmentary missing pixels on a TV screen, Lisa’s vision deteriorated.

In 1986, she was heartbroken when she could no longer drive. In 2000, she formed her last strong memories of her sons: 6-foot Joey holding his diploma from Thousand Oaks High School, and blue-eyed Danny’s thrilling 9th-inning RBI in the season’s final elimination game.

She had never seen her grandkids, and she never really saw her sons as adults.

In some respects, Lisa Kulik, 55, was a prisoner of her ranch-style house on Clara Lane.

Her “jailer” was retinitis pigmentosa. Her own damaged photoreceptors, robbed of the rods and cones we take for granted, made the outside world dark, confusing, even dangerous.

23

“My house is one of the few places I can move around on my own,” said Lisa. “But outside, I can barely walk to get the trashcan off the driveway. If I ever needed to run to the neighbors’, I couldn’t do it. At least with the driveway, I can feel the rocks on the side. But just keeping on the sidewalk without falling off the curb—I don’t think I can do it.”

Fridays are the best, she said, when Ed is home and the couple normally heads to their cabin on the Colorado River. In the mornings, the river is as smooth as glass, and they slide out on a red and white Sport Nautique ski boat called Wet Dreams.

Later in the day, at 115 degrees, Arizona becomes the sun’s anvil, but, wakeboarding or waterskiing on the Colorado, this is Lisa’s time. She rides the water until her hips get sore and she can feel the breath of places as far away as the Rockies or the canyon lands of Utah wash over her.

Lisa's post-surgery "fitting sessions" were the first steps in training her brain to interpret the new flashes of light as the shapes and patterns of the world.

“We like to go against the current,” said Lisa.

“It’s like freedom.”

“The doctors told me there was no cure for RP,” Lisa said. For 30 years, she had to be satisfied with that answer.

In the fall of 2012, Ed was reading science news stories on his iPhone. “Fox News had a story about help for retinitis pigmentosa,” Ed said. “I told Lisa, ‘You gotta call about this.’”

The technology was the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, often referred to as an artificial retina or the “the world’s first bionic eye.” Coinvented and co-developed over a period of 25 years by Professor Mark Humayun, M.D., Ph.D., a USC ophthalmologist and biomedical engineer, the device offers partial restoration of vision to people with RP. Now commercialized by Second Sight Medical Products in Sylmar, California, the Argus II received FDA approval in March 2013 and Medicare approval seven months later. To date, it is the first prosthetic device for the blind available in the United States.

When she was a kid, Lisa used to watch “Romper Room,” the long-running children’s series. “Every episode used to end with the lady looking into her magic mirror and ‘seeing’ all the children around the world,” Lisa said. “I used to think she could see me too.

“I thought this might be like my magic mirror.”

Having developed the technology, USC was designated one of 13 approved surgery centers in the United States. Lisa first came to USC in July 2013, meeting with Dr. Lisa Olmos de Koo of the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Olmos determined her to be a perfect candidate.

“They told us [the surgery] might be able to happen in a couple weeks,” Lisa said.

Yet by the end of 2013, no surgery date had been set. Even though Medicare had approved the surgery in October, the Kuliks still needed their private insurer, CIGNA, to sign off on it.

“CIGNA fought us tooth and nail,” said Ed. But by mid-May 2014, nearly a year after the initial visit, the surgery was approved. “I had the

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“Bionic Woman” premieres on ABC, a spin-off “The Six-Million Dollar Man.” 24 Fall 2014

1977

Lisa and Ed Kulik graduate Hollywood High School.

1979

Lisa and Ed’s first meeting at a party in the Hollywood Hills.

1 980

Lisa and Ed married; Lisa diagnosed with a strange “night blindness” and spots on her retina.

woman on the phone read the approval letter to me word for word because I didn’t believe her,” Lisa said.

June 2, 2014, the day of the surgery, was Lisa’s Cecil B. DeMille moment. After facing the assembled press and cameras, she smiled. “I was more nervous for this than I am for the surgery,” she said.

As she was wheeled into the USC Eye Institute's out-patient OR, the word “yes” was written over her left eye, denoting which eye would receive the artificial retina. Lisa marveled that in age of bionic eyes and cochlear implants, sometimes the best tool for the job is a black Sharpie.

For five hours, Ed waited. After a while, he fled to a grassy spot on the USC Health Sciences Campus, smoking La Gloria Cubanas, trying not to think about all the possible complications.

Lisa, of course, has no memory of those hours, nor how this marvel of engineering and surgical precision found its way into and around her eye. How her eyeball was exposed in all its extra-ocular glory, how an exquisitely crafted circuit and receiver were

1981

Joey Kulik born (older son).

PHOTO: GUS RUELAS

Mark Humayun, the nationally renowned eye doctor and biomedical engineer who co-invented the Argus II artificial retina, meets with Lisa, one of the first commercial patients in the United States.

tied around that eyeball like a silicon belt buckle.

How Olmos made a 5-millimeter incision into the sclera (the white part of her eye) to slide a 60-electrode array inside and tack it oh-so-carefully to the macula, the retina’s yellow oval for central vision.

“The most critical step,” observed Humayun, “is to make sure the array is very flat on the retina.” That’s the very delicate interface, where 21st-century microelectronics talk directly to 200,000-year-old Homo sapiens brains.

Mark Humayun, now a USC ophthalmologist, and biomedical engineer begins his quest to restore sight to the blind. Artificial retina considered “science fiction.”

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Lisa formally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

1986

“The wilderness years.” Humayun lives two lives: from 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the clinic, a practicing eye doctor; from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., an engineer, groping for a tech response to blind patients.

Lisa’s driver’s license revoked.

1 988 1987

After leading the development of the Argus II system, USC had pioneered the initial clinical trials. Now, the USC Eye Institute was the second successful commercial surgery site in the United States, and Lisa Kulik was its first patient.

In experiment with 70-year-old Harold Churchey, Humayun’s team proves that blind patients can still perceive light signals in the brain.

1 990

Danny Kulik born (younger son) / Lisa officially retires.

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25

The Argus II is not human vision—it’s computer vision. A video camera mounted on the Argus II glasses sees the world. That black-and-white, 320 x 240 pixel camera image of the world travels down a wire to a video processing unit worn at the waist. The VPU translates that video into 60 electrical pulses, one for each electrode nestled against Lisa’s retina. These electrical pulses pass through the optic nerve to the brain, allowing the sensation of light. That’s what patients like Lisa learn to interpret as visual patterns.

Lisa’s new world is essentially a 6-by-10 grid of light. But unlike the old Lite-Brite toy, it requires a great deal more rehab and training to discern an image. It took a week before she could activate the camera for the first time.

They say that when Balboa first saw the Pacific Ocean, he had just scaled the summit of a mountain in Panama. When Yuri Gagarin first saw the planet Earth from space, he was crammed inside a tiny Vostok 1 spacecraft. When Lisa Kulik first saw the world through her new bionic vision, she was in a tiny room on the fourth floor of the USC Eye Institute.

James Weiland, USC professor of ophthalmology and biomedical engineering, sat opposite Lisa, his laptop depicting the grid of 60 electrodes. He’s been collaborating with Humayun since nearly the beginning, and in fact Weiland was sitting opposite Harold Churchey in 2002 when Churchey, the first recipient of an artificial retina, saw light for the first time in 50 years.

James Weiland, future collaborator in USC’s Biolectronic Research Lab, joins the artificial retina project.

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26 Fall 2014

20 0 0

Lisa’s last clear images of her sons.

During surgery at USC, Harold Churchey becomes the first human in the world to receive an artificial retina, Argus I.

20 02

There was a sudden beep.

“It said hello,” Weiland said. “The processor is talking to the implant in your eye.”

Lisa was given a video game joystick, not unlike an Xbox controller.

“Hit right for when you see the flash of light, left for when you don’t see it,” said Weiland, indicating the controller. “We’re stimulating the electrodes in your eye. We want to know the minimum amount of electricity for you to see something.”

A few minutes later, Lisa noted, “It was a quick flash, more of a straight line to the left. It went from here over to here. Like a snake, kind of.”

“You’re seeing snakes?” Ed laughed.

Weiland, the team from Second Sight, and Lan Yue, a postdoctoral researcher in the Humayun-Weiland lab, were pleased. Lisa’s first “fitting” session of the Argus II—like tuning a guitar, each of the 60 electrodes must be “tuned” to find the right amount of current that will stimulate Lisa’s dormant retinal cells—was a success.

Initially, Weiland was unsure how valuable 60 electrodes might be for the blind. But after seeing the results of dozens of patients, Weiland has become a believer: “A little bit of vision goes a really long way.”

Their last Friday in Los Angeles, Lisa and Ed went for a walk.

Partnership between USC Viterbi School and Keck School of Medicine of USC results in $17 million NSF-funded Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center (BMES ERC) .

20 03

PHOTO: NOE MONTES

Standing outside the USC Eye Institute, Lisa tested the Argus II glasses for the first time. Ed stood next to her, holding her arm, as he always does. Suddenly, he let go.

“No,” Ed said, “you need to try it on your own.”

This was not her home on Clara Lane. It was a busy university campus, with buses, shuttles, cars, students and patients. Her only guide was her “magic mirror” and the seldom-used imageprocessing power of her own brain.

On the VPU at her waist, Lisa toggled between the Argus II’s four settings: bright light conditions, lower light with shadows, enhanced borders and edge detection, and inverse contrast for dusk or no light conditions.

She noticed the contrast of the dark asphalt on the street and the lighter pavement of the sidewalk. She noticed the dark interruption of a bush in the midst of the sidewalk itself. She saw the white lines of the crosswalk.

Slowly, Lisa stepped out into the California sunshine.

That night, on Humayun’s advice, Lisa saw the moon for the first time in 25 years. It was Friday the 13th and Lisa couldn’t help herself: She howled at the moon.

Lisa and Ed Kulik walking outside the USC Eye Institute, shortly after her Argus II surgery. "My hope was to regain a little bit of freedom," Lisa says of her new bionic vision.

Kathy Blake, an Orange County resident, becomes the first U.S. recipient of the 60-electrode Argus II.

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PHOTO: GUS RUELAS

2012

Ed Kulik first learns about Argus II – via a Fox News science story.

Argus II receives FDA approval; Medicare agrees to partial coverage.

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Lisa Kulik receives Argus II artificial retina at USC Eye Institute.

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JO N GRATC H , R E S E A R C H P R O F E S S O R O F CO M PUTER SCI E N C E A N D P SYC H O LO GY STORY BY ADAM SMITH ART BY SAHARAT TANTIVARANYOO

One night I was visited by five emotions. Shame. Anger.

Joy. Frustration. Hope.

Each wanted the same thing.

To be made a gift.

To all the world’s Spock-like machines.

28 Fall 2014

Shame took me to the home of an Army private struggling with PTSD.

Like so many others, he didn’t want to be judged.

I recognized Ellie, our virtual counselor, at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

Ellie did not judge him. Ellie listened, Ellie recognized and responded to the shame.

Anger took me to a military training site. Officers being taught to wage a new type of war, one for “hearts and minds.”

How do you train a lieutenant to deal with an angry village elder? How about a mother, furious at the death of her child?

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Joy took me to an office in Poughkeepsie, New York.

It had been a long day, and a man had received over 40 emails in the last hour.

The computer decided to lighten the mood.

Frustration took me to a mother in Peoria, IL.

She’d been on the phone with her insurance company for hours, frustrated by the false empathy and lack of control from the automated voice on the other end.

30 Fall 2014

Hope took me to a little girl in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

She was one of 1,000 kids entering the regional science fair.

Her phone had some words of encouragement.

They took me to one final place. The home of Antonio Damasio’s famous Patient Elliot.

A brilliant man – charming, logical, perfect memory. Due to damage in PART OF HIS prefrontal cortex, he had no ability to recognize or properly respond to others' emotions.

Patient Elliot was an invalid. He couldn’t even get up in the morning.

We think that emotion is the enemy of reason. But the truth is, emotion is our way of assigning value to things. Without emotion, like Patient Elliot, we are paralyzed by limitless choices.

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Machiavelli Ten years ago, Stacy Marsella and I created EMA – an emotion engine.

FREUD

We took everything we learned about psychology and appraisal theory basically assigning machines goals, worldviews

JUNG

something to judge the value of any given event.

But my visitors wanted more.

It wasn’t so much that machines wanted to be sad or ashamed.

But on a planet of seven billion emotional humans, in an age of social machines and the Internet of Things, they wanted to understand what made us so.

32 Fall 2014

They wanted to better understand the markers of human emotion: facial expressions, posture, vocal changes, heart-rate variability, even skin conductance.

And then, perhaps, how they might respond accordingly.

Then I awoke.

Though my smartphone didn’t know it, there was a feeling not unlike relief.

I’ve been trying to give computers emotions for 15 years.

The funny thing: most of my students and interns would probably say I don’t have emotions.

There’s an old joke that scientists study what they lack. Rather, I think scientists tend to be puzzled by what they don’t know or don’t control.

Maybe, just maybe, through the detours of giving machines emotions, I was actually learning about myself.

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CKISS M E I T A TO K AS TOLD

ICK

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the astronautics program at USC Viterbi, recent alums share their passion of space and technology and how they plan to follow in the footsteps of alumnus Neil Armstrong (M.S Aerospace '70).

34 Fall 2014

Space Ambition: To become an astronaut.

“In 2013, I was part of NASA’s Astronaut Selection Process and was selected an Astronaut Finalist Interviewee" (top 1 percent of applicant pool; 50 out of 6,300 applicants).

“ I BELIEVE SPACE FULFILLS AN AN INNATE INNATE CURIOSITY CURIOSITY THAT THAT

ALL ALL HUMANS HUMANS HAVE HAVE TO TO

“

EXPLORE

NEW NEW FRONTIERS. FRONTIERS. ”

ALEJANDRO R. DIAZ Senior engineer, Boeing (16 years) Graduation year: 2012 (Ph.D., Astronautical Engineering)

Mars landing quote: “We come in peace for all mankind. May God bless us.”

35

SARAH CUSSON Graduation year: B.S. Astronautics, 2014 Currently: Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan Favorite space movie: O ctober Sky

Mars landing quote: “Boy, it sure is dusty out here.”

Space Credits: “Doing research and development on advanced propulsion systems (like the BPT-4000 Hall Effect Thruster,) which are currently flying in space today. It’s critical to develop these technologies to enable faster, cheaper and more efficient space travel for both human and non-human missions.”

e c a p s n i d ste e r e t n i e m ca my “I first be ing up listening to t w while gro r tell stories abou e grandfath on the Apollo and his work missions.”

Gemini

36 Fall 2014

“Growing up, I alwa ys wante I wa s t o r d to be an n between explorer e x ploring t the solar ... he Titanic system ab wreck be ove. I vivi the realiz low and d l y r e member t ation: peo he momen ple have a but no on t I made l r eady gone e’s gone t to the Tit o Mars! F anic, r om then o be the fir n I wanted st person to o n M a r s. ” Space Credits: “My proudest achievement to date comes from the USC Rocket Lab. As a group of students, we spent years growing the organization and developing the technologies required to get an amateur rocket into space.

We successfully launched several incremental rockets before designing and building Traveler— the first university space-shot attempt.”

SCOTT MACKLIN Propulsion Systems Engineer, Virgin Galactic Graduation year: B.S. Aerospace Engineering, 2011, M.S. Aerospace Engineering, 2013

Mars landing quote: “With one giant leap, humanity showed it is capable. With another giant leap, today humanity shows it is committed.”

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”” I’M WITH THPROPULSION. PROPULSION. I’M– –OBSESSED OBSESSED– – WI ROC KE T ENGINES ARE INC REDIBLY ENERGY-DENSE MAC HINES. HOW C OULD YOU NOT BE – –OBSESSED WITH THI T?” I T?” OBSESSED– – WI

Origin Story: “I went to a summer science camp when I was six or seven and we built Estes model rockets, and I just totally would NOT shut up about it to my parents.

My grandmother bought me one for my birthday that year. It was all downhill from there.”

DAVID REESE Graduation year: B.S. Aerospace Engineering (Astronautics), 2009 Currently: Ph.D. candidate, Purdue University Favorite space movie: The Right Stuff

38 Fall 2014

SARAH THOMAS Graduation year: B.S., Astronautics, 2009, M.S., Astronautics, 2011 Propulsion Engineer, SpaceX Space Ambition: “Exploring another world and making it habitable.”

Mars landing quote: “In this one small step, mankind has entered a new and thrilling age of multi-planetary life!” But I have a feeling my accidental first words would be something more like “holy $#*, this is awesome!”

Space Credits: “My greatest space-related achievement so far was working on the Merlin 1C engines for the first flight of the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX was a much smaller company at the time, and I had the opportunity to work hands-on with each of the engines. Seeing the rocket fly successfully and knowing I had a part in it was one of the most exciting moments of my life.”

C CEE A L A P L P L L A CA G GIIC O L O L T S T OS MO TTH HEE M

ME – – FOR

E R O M N R E IS – A C A E P S L O T ”” – E, K S O R E O V I N TO L U E H D T N T A U E O R A AB E .. ” W M M O O O R H R F E W EF M M A A C C E WE E EW R R E E H H W W

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40 Fall 2014

ART: GREGORY EUCLIDE

S AV I N G THE G A R D E N OF E DE N Azzam Alwash, Ph.D. '89, returned to his native Iraq to restore its wetlands—and a way of life.

By Rosalie Mur phy

C

hibaish, Iraq—“How do you describe destruction? Where life was, where reeds were, where birds roamed, where fishing took place, where life was happening, now you had nothing but sand and clay and tumbleweed.”

When Azzam Alwash, Ph.D. ’89, returned to his native Iraq in June 2003, he found disfigured murals of Saddam Hussein and thousands of American troops in Baghdad. But he was horrified when he reached Iraq’s southeastern wetlands, where he grew up. In the preceding decade, Iraqi regime had systematically drained more than 90 percent of the region, home to the world’s oldest civilizations and nearly half a million people.

Since then, Alwash, 55, has been working to restore his homeland and resuscitate the mythical Garden of Eden.

USC Viterbi’s 2014 Junior Alumni Award winner, Alwash was born in the area nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Anthropologists believe the kingdoms of Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria rose and fell between these rivers. The Biblical Garden of Eden was might well have been there. Agriculture, banking and writing were born there. For millennia, these wetlands supported rice, wheat, barley, fish and buffalo. People here lived in houses built from reeds, accessible only by boats. They sold reed mats and baskets and harvested most of their own food.

“Mankind did not settle there coincidentally, like, oh, this looks like a nice place. It’s a place where they actually can make a living easily enough without having to go follow the food. The food was there,” Alwash said. “And it’s gone.”

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S

earching for oil, Iraq’s government engineers began draining the marshes in the 1950s. This process intensified after the failed Iraqi uprisings of 1991, when the Shi'a Marsh Arabs were targeted for punitive action. In response, the regime built embankments and excavated canals redirecting the rivers around the marshes.

Governments worldwide have drained wetlands in the past century to deprive mosquitoes of their natural habitat or access minerals underneath. Few have sought to destroy a population. Yet before Saddam fell, more than 90 percent of Iraq’s southeastern wetlands became barren. Nine species of birds became endangered, and the region’s average temperature increased by 5 degrees Celsius. And only a few thousand people remained on the land their ancestors had cultivated for millennia.

The rest moved to cities or took refuge in Iran and elsewhere, including Southern California.

“In 1991, half a million people earned their living through activities connected to the marshes,” Alwash said. “They didn’t want the marshes restored because they’re ‘tree huggers’—they wanted a way of making a living.

GR ADUAL DESTRUCTIO N They wanted to recover their way of life.”

Alwash, a 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize winner, wouldn’t call himself a “tree hugger” either. In 1978, he was ordered to join the pro-Hussein Students Union or become ineligible for postgraduate work. He moved to the United States and enrolled at California State University, Fullerton, instead. He completed his Ph.D. in civil engineering at USC Viterbi in 1989.

Next came a lucrative job at an Orange County consulting firm. Alwash and his wife loved to kayak, and he promised to take her and their daughters to his homeland someday.

“I was a kayaker, and so I became involved with water issues and the Clean Water Act,” Alwash said. “Then I began hearing news of the drying of the marshes, which is where I grew up, and that was the beginning of my environmental awareness—of trying to put the spotlight on the importance of the environment, not only for birds and fish and plants, but really as an economic source for people who live in the marshes.”

Many Marsh Arabs are livestock farmers, so without water buffalo and sheep they cannot

work. Some herd, hunt, fish and produce handicrafts. But nearly all their resources depend on healthy wetlands.

NASA revealed satellite images of the decimated region in 2001. Shocked, Alwash and his wife reached out to ecologists, hydrologists and botanists worldwide to find a way to restore the wetlands. They called the project Eden Again.

“I tried to put the spotlight on using water as a weapon of mass destruction,” Alwash explained.

In June 2003, Alwash went on a two-week U.S. State Department exploratory visit to Iraq.

That trip turned into his lifelong commitment.

Today, thanks to his engineering expertise, local alliances and Baghdad lobbying visits, at least 75 percent of the marshlands are returning to health.

“The guy just became a war horse,” said Richard Miller, Alwash’s Ph.D. advisor and now president at Olin College of Engineering. “He was getting on planes, going everywhere and raising money.”

F

RESTO RATIO N

or a decade, Alwash has advised the Marsh Arabs, or Ma’dan, on the mechanics of restoration.

“From day one working in Iraq, I was in love. First of all, there are no planning commissions to go to. There’s engineering in the old-fashioned way, trial and error. Instead of studying it for 10 years, let’s do it and see what happens,” Alwash said. “Here I was, doing engineering with a calculator on the back of an envelope, and it was fun. It was why I did engineering in the first place.

I loved it.”

The marsh residents had already begun knocking down the government-built dams, and Alwash picked strategic spots to destroy or build levees to make sure the rivers flowed continuously. Within six months, reeds began to grow and fish returned, followed by birds. After 10 years and $150 million, mostly from donations, the marshes have largely come back from the brink.

“While the groundwork was done by Marsh Arabs themselves, my contribution was to use my technical skills to help them make the breaks at the proper places where they can get the biggest bang for the cubic meter of water, so to speak,” Alwash said.

But this flowering, flowing project has had to employ armed guards too. In 2005, a local gang kidnapped five members of Alwash’s team for ransom. The victims’ families paid, but Alwash refused

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“ T H E E N V I R O N M E N T D O E S N OT R E C O GN I Z E P O L I T I CA L B O R D E R S ”

A

to negotiate, lest the rest of his team be targeted.

Now they bring sentries on every visit.

“You have to be careful and savvy, but all Iraqis have the same chances,” Alwash said. “I can’t wait for the end of the war. Of course it hinders our work, but it has not stopped us.”

Alwash also served as a political liaison for a historically underrepresented group. The Ma’dan were long considered Iraq’s “hillbillies”—poor, old-fashioned and unhealthy. Many in the marshes suffer from jaundice, digestive problems and mosquito-borne diseases. Literacy rates are very low.

“Being trained in Western democracy, I was able to help Iraq’s newly freed people use the newly acquired tools of democracy to lobby for their point of view,” Alwash said.

Some Marsh Arab advocates opposed Alwash’s work, saying that moving away from the marshes would empower the Ma’dan instead of encouraging outdated techniques to persist.

“I make it sound romantic, living amongst nature, building your houses out of reeds. Try it—it's not fun," Alwash said. The region still lacks access to electricity, and the marsh waters have become brackish and can no longer support rice. Though several thousand Marsh Arabs have returned, Alwash does not expect them to stay for more than a generation.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF AZZAM ALWASH

lwash, too, has left the marshes. He spends most of his time now in Baghdad, lobbying for Iraq’s nascent environmental movement. Eden Again has evolved into Nature Iraq, the nation’s first environmental NGO, which seeks to protect biodiversity nationwide. Last year the Central Marshes became Iraq’s first national park, and the group is building 10 more parks.

But Alwash has already expanded his focus.

“Over the past 10 years of working on the environment, I am painfully aware that the environment does not recognize political borders,” Alwash said. “What happens in Turkey affects what happens in the northern Gulf. What happens in the Gulf affects what happens in the Arabian Sea. You have to work at a bigger map, at a bigger and bigger level.”

Dams upstream in Turkey and Syria limit the extent of the marsh restoration because they prevent annual floods, which naturally fertilized nearby soil until the first dams appeared in the 1960s.

“All the issues cannot all be dumped on the previous government. This is a global issue of water distribution,” said Sami Masri, a USC Viterbi professor of civil and environmental engineering who worked with Alwash on his Ph.D. research and considers him a close friend.

“Still, some of the damage is irreversible,” Masri said.

Alwash’s next “self-assigned mission” transcends these borders. He hopes to use his growing political influence to begin to arrange water treaties between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

For anyone else, this might seem daunting. But Alwash’s peers also said the marshes couldn’t be restored. He’s comfortable facing the impossible.

“Besides the marshes, besides the environment, I started a university [the American University of Iraq]. I worked in politics. Every now and then, I make an economic deal. It’s addictive,” Alwash said. “I’m getting four once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in one lifetime. How lucky is that?”

43

ROBO BUDS Research by USC Viterbi robotics experts suggests that robots might one day help children with autism become more socially integrated.

I

By Marc Ballon

n the recent past, robots often conjured up dystopian images of technology gone awry.

In The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a bot from the future dispatched to kill Sarah Connor (and in future installments, her son). The android Gunslinger, played

by Yul Brynner in the 1973 sci-fi classic Westworld, shoots up his human tormentors after tiring of losing gunfights in the eponymous adult-amusement park.

These days, though, the negative stereotypes of have given way to a new image—that of robots as friends rather than foes. The work of USC Viterbi Professor Maja Matarić and other robotic researchers has contributed to this long-overdue reassessment.

Matarić, the Chan Soon-Shiong Chair in the Computer Science Department, Neuroscience Program, and the Department of Pediatrics, believes that robots might one day play an integral role in improving health care. For more than a decade, she and her research team have studied ways in which robots might provide one-to-one personalized care to assist various populations, including people with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke patients and children with autism. The field of socially assistive robotics, defined about a decade ago by Matarić and her former graduate student, David Feil-Seifer, holds great promise.

“There is a vast health care need that can be filled by intelligent machines capable of helping people of all ages to be less lonely, to do rehabilitative exercises and to learn social behaviors,” Matarić said. “There’s so much that can be done that can complement human care as well as other emerging technologies.”

44 Fall 2014

With an estimated one in 68 children identified as having autism spectrum disorder—a neurological condition that impairs communication, the ability to form relationships and respond appropriately to one’s surroundings, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—Matarić and her Ph.D. students’ work with robots seems especially relevant. Several research

“There is a vast health care need that can be filled by intelligent machines capable of helping people of all ages to be less lonely, to do rehabilitative exercises and to learn social behaviors,” Maja Mataric said.

projects that have come out of her USC Interaction Lab suggest that robots have the potential to assist children with autism with social engagement, taking turns and imitating behaviors.

“There’s something about robots that can elicit latent behaviors that children with autism are capable of but rarely or never exhibit,” said Matarić, who was recently named by Design News as one of the “10 Most Influential Female Engineers.” “If the behaviors are there, they can be elicited, and they can be trained.”

In one USC Viterbi study, robots encouraged social interaction by blowing bubbles whenever children with autism moved closer and engaged them. Some children reacted so well to the robots that they turned to their parents to describe events as they unfolded.

The robots “provoked and encouraged social interaction,” said Feil-Seifer, who helped oversee that 2009 study and is now continuing autismrelated research at the University of Nevada, Reno, as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The research also provided invaluable insights into how to make robots more appealing to children with autism, he added.

For example, at the beginning of the study, the robot's motors emitted a high-pitched noise that bothered some children, who had trouble positively interacting with it. Simple issues like this were solved with a software patch. More important, researchers designed an automated system to determine when children interacting with robots became uncomfortable. Based on this information, it might be possible in the future to program a robot to change movements should a child with autism react poorly, Feil-Seifer said.

to interactions with other people and settings.

It must be stressed, however, that Matarić A USC Viterbi study conducted last year at an and her team have largely focused on programelementary school near campus illustrates how roming robots that could better interact with chilbots might inspire children with autism to become dren with autism instead of focusing on specific more socially engaged. therapeutic applications. Elaine Short, one of To see whether robots might help children Matarić’s Ph.D. students, is trying to develop with autism imitate certain behaviors, Matarić’s software and models that will make robots’ custeam evenly divided 12 children, ages 7 to 10, into tomized engagements with children with autism experimental and control groups. Over the course more positive. Additionally, researchers have yet of two and a half weeks, robots encouraged the to conduct large-scale clinical trials to ascertain children to imitate 25 different arm poses. The the long-term effectiveness of any robotic interrobot nodded and flashed its eyes green when the actions with children with autism. child copied the poses Still, anecdotal correctly, and said, “Good evidence suggests that job!” or “You got it right!” some children with autism When children in the interact well with robots, “There’s so much that can be control group failed to perhaps because the imitate accurately, the machines are more predone that can complement robot gave them the same dictable than people. USC human care as well as other command repeatedly, researchers have observed without variation. In the robots motivating children emerging technologies.” study, the performance of to engage more with their those children regressed or surroundings, giving hope stayed the same. that such behavior learned By contrast, chilwith a robot could transfer dren in the experimental group received ever more detailed instructions when they erred. The first prompt was verbal only: “Are you sure that’s right?” Next, the robot delivered additional instructions along with a gesture.

Demonstrating the correct pose, the robot said, “Look again at your left arm.” The robot gave up to four cues, providing the minimum amount of feedback until children got it right. The result: children receiving so-called graded cueing feedback improved or stayed the same, suggesting that varied instructions were more helpful.

“In this study we used graded cueing to develop the social skill of imitation through the copycat

game,” said Jill Greczek, a doctoral student in Matarić’s group who oversaw the study. “Our hope is that learning such skills could be generalized.

So, if a child with autism is at recess with friends, and some kids are playing Red Light/Green Light, the child might look at the game and say, ‘Oh, I see how to play, and I can play with them too.”’

Matarić hopes that within a decade children with autism could have their own personal robot buddies to complement therapy. In the morning, the robot might encourage a child to get out of bed and get dressed. At school, the robot could discreetly coach them to make eye contact with teacher or peers, or to take turns as appropriate.

On the playground, the robot companion could praise them when they try to initiate a conversation or play with others. “Hey, that was great. Let’s try again.”

“The idea is to eventually give every child a personalized robot dedicated to providing motivation and praise and nudges toward more integration,” Matarić said.

Is it possible? Technologically, the creation of such intelligent robots is within reach. However, the current reluctance of some investors to support robotics, and the lack of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to perform sufficiently large clinical trials poses challenges. Some critics argue that robots can only train children with autism to interact with robots, not with people.

Matarić challenges those who fail to see robots’ potential to suggest a cost-effective, realistic alternative.

“There are literally millions of people today who are isolated and left behind,” she said. “I think to dismiss a technology just because it’s not yet proven and is not a person is very naïve and ignores the very real and growing needs of large populations.”

Robots, once viewed with suspicion, might one day help children with autism become more socially engaged and integrated.

Maja Matarić, Chan Soon-Shiong Chair of Computer Science, Neuroscience and Pediatrics, seen here with one of the Nao robots used to aid children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

45

ALUMNI

“But the worst o’ your foes is the sun over’ead/ You must wear your ’elmet for all that is said/If ’e find you uncovered ’e’ll knock you down dead.”

It has some of the most unforgiving terrain in the world, a landlocked, mountainous country plagued with frostbitten winters and blazingly hot summers. “But the worst o’ your foes is the sun over’ead/You must wear your ’elmet for all that is said/If ’e find you uncovered ’e’ll knock you down dead,” British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote in “The Young British Soldier.”

Soaked for centuries in the blood from many an invading army, Afghanistan remains a ruggedly beautiful but desolate outpost suitable for only the hardiest of souls. Add acute economic underdevelopment and ethnic and tribal violence to the mix, and Afghanistan becomes even more forbidding.

It’s also the place where Col. Michael Price, M.S. ’93, proudly served until recently.

A 25-year Army veteran, Price has served around the globe, from Kansas City to Germany to Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. He says he will never forget Afghanistan or its people.

In July 2013, Price went to Afghanistan to lead the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to help rebuild the war-torn country before the departure of U.S. troops. As head of the Transatlantic Afghanistan District, Price oversaw 330 Americans, who, in cooperation with Afghan contractors, worked on about 250 projects, mainly the construction of airfields, barracks, medical facilities and other key infrastructure initiatives that will benefit the Afghan

46 Fall 2014

National Army and police. He also supervised several civilian projects, including a $10 million women’s dormitory at Herat University that will house 113 students.

“I believe in the mission. I could have gone to Washington, D.C., but I came here because I believe we need to finish what we’ve started,” said Price, who was based in Kabul until returning to the U.S. this summer. “We’re making history for the [U.S. Army] Corps [of Engineers] and for the United States. I believe Afghanistan has a bright future in front of it.”

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States invaded Afghanistan to topple the repressive Taliban, which provided sanctuary to Al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin-Laden. The Taliban’s defeat has benefited many Afghans. In April, The Economist reported a tenfold increase in the number of Afghans with access to basic health care, the proliferation of media and millions of children, including girls, now receiving an education.

In May, President Obama announced he planned to withdraw the last troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016.

A 1989 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, Price earned a master of science degree in systems engineering from USC Viterbi in 1993 through a satellite campus in Wuerzburg, Germany. The USC program, he said, “taught me how to think scientifically and thoroughly."

PHOTO: GET TY IMAGES

Price first came to Afghanistan in 2002 to plan combat operations, and returned two years later for the same duties. During his third tour of duty in 2006 and 2007, Price trained and deployed an entire battalion to Afghanistan and successfully oversaw its return to the U.S. His battalion suffered not a single casualty.

Whenever Price traveled around Afghanistan, he said, locals thanked him and the Americans for “taking back their country” and for providing work and opportunity.

One project that garnered considerable goodwill was the upgrade of the Salang Tunnel, a 1.6-mile pass that connects the north to Kabul. Built by the Soviets in 1964, the tunnel had fallen into such disrepair that truckers trapped inside during extreme traffic jams occasionally died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Under Price’s supervision, a team of Afghan contractors repaved the road and added new lighting and exhaust fans. The tunnel reopened in December 2013. The result: gridlock largely vanished and internal trade flourished.

“I made an impact every day,” said Price. “I was a planner, organizer, troubleshooter. I did a bit of everything.”

Whenever possible, he visited project sites throughout the country. However,

PHOTOS COURTESY OF COL . MICHAEL PRICE

security concerns often kept him away.

Adding to Price’s difficulties were frequent delays in shipments of water heaters, generators, electrical components and other important items through the oft-closed Pakistani border.

The myriad of challenges sometimes wore on him. He missed fishing and hunting back home in Michigan, along with precious time with loved ones.

Still, Price said he treasured his time in Afghanistan. To communicate with the local population, he learned a little Farsi. “It says a lot to an Afghan when you try to speak their language,” he said. He has also read vociferously about the region, counting Steve Coll’s The Ghost Wars, which details America’s history in Afghanistan, and Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner among his favorites “He is the epitome of a leader,” said Maj. Steve Holmberg, who has known Price for 12 years and served as his adjutant for the 41st Engineering Battalion in Fort Drum, New York. “He always leads from the front, with his words and actions consistently aligned.”

“I’ve told the Afghans that I hope one day to bring my family here as tourists,” Price said. “This is a beautiful country, and I would like to share it with them.”

47

ALUMNI

A STATE OF MIND

By Megan Hazle Anita Sengupta has a mission: to build the coldest spot in the universe.

“Everyone thinks space is cold. It has a temperature of about 4 Kelvin,” said Sengupta, M.S. ’00, Ph.D. ’05 in Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering. “But the temperature that we’re going to get to is 100 x 10-12 Kelvin, so it’s a trillion times colder than space is. Temperatures so low they can only be obtained using a technique called laser cooling in a microgravity environment.”

At this temperature so close to 0 Kelvin, or absolute zero, atoms stand nearly still. And that’s exactly the point: When matter is cooled to just above absolute zero, which is essentially zero energy, it takes on a completely different state called “matter waves.” When the gas is made of fundamental particles called bosons, you form something called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), which is another state of matter. In this quantum state, where most atoms of the same kind have the same level of energy down to an identical spin of their electrons, the energy wave from each atom overlaps and therefore amplifies,

Anita Sengupta with the Cold Atom Laboratory at JPL

resulting in a cloud of atoms that can be seen with the naked eye. By studying matter in this state, scientists can gain insight into how the universe was formed.

“You can see the ultra-cold atom cloud in the lab experiments,” said Sengupta. “It’s like a little mini-universe. That’s the interesting part, because a BEC may be similar to how the universe behaved thermodynamically when it first formed. It’s a ball of gas all at the same quantum state, and then it starts to expand.”

Sengupta is the project manager in charge of building the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), a NASA project being developed by the Jet Propulsion

48 Fall 2014

Anita Sengupta (M.S. '00) helped land a one-ton robot on Mars. Her next project: exploring the origins of the universe.

Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. CAL is an instrument about the size of a freezer that will be transported in a SpaceX Dragon Capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) late in 2016. Its mission is to understand the behavior of the universe’s tiniest particles by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter first suggested by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in the 1920s, in which elementary particles like photons can behave as both particles and waves.

The wave nature of these particles, however, can only be observed at extremely cold temperatures. Although some experiments on matter waves are already being done on Earth, conducting the tests in the ISS, away from the planet’s gravity and magnetic fields, will allow scientists to experiment in a lab environment a magnitude or two colder, and therefore that much closer to the elusive zero-energy state.

Laser beams will be fired at rubidium (Rb) and potassium (K) atoms from all sides inside an evacuated glass chamber. The lasers are precisely tuned to the resonance frequency of Rb and K; as a result, the light actually pushes on the atoms, slowing them down. (“You can of think of laser cooling as a type of optical molasses,” Sengupta explained.)

Exposing the atoms to radio frequency radiation cools them further. What’s left is a cloud of bosons at a temperature of almost absolute zero, making the CAL the coldest spot in the universe.

CAL’s team of flight investigators includes three Nobel Laureates. One experiment will look at how the universe’s complexity evolves from the quantum scale. Never before has an experiment been performed that could allow probing of physics at the Planck scale. Another experiment will look into proving (or disproving) Einstein’s equivalence principle (is gravity a force or a property of space-time geometry, as he theorized?), as well as answering the mystery of why a BEC is able to slow down light. Although light can be slowed a bit in a vacuum, when put through a BEC it slows orders of magnitude lower.

“Normally it would be instantaneous,” said Sengupta, “but it also comes out with the exact same quantum state [as the BEC], so it has the

possibility to do something called quantum computing. You’re able to encode the information into the BEC and have it come out the other side the exact same way.”

If this concept rings a bell, you’re probably a Star Trek fan—it’s the same principle behind the transporter, which encodes information on one end and spits crewmembers out on the surface of an alien planet.

Perhaps CAL and space missions like it, focused on elementary particles instead of distant planets, will eventually enable much more extensive exploration of the Final Frontier.

For now, however, Sengupta is focused on the mission at hand.

Her last project entailed designing the parachute deployment system that would safely (and gently) deliver the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars. CAL will be delivered to the ISS via a much less dramatic, and relatively risk-free, SpaceX shuttle trip and hand-installed by an astronaut. But this project has its own set of challenges, including designing within a tight space, developing a thermal system that will work in microgravity and maintaining the precise optical alignments necessary for the instruments’ lasers.

Sengupta’s team of engineers, which includes several other USC alumni, is enthusiastically tackling them all.

“That’s actually the fun part,” she said. “No one wants things to go wrong, but the minute you have a problem to solve, everyone just jumps on it and comes up with a solution for it. There is an infinite amount of solutions to every problem. It’s enjoyable to find what that is.”

When she’s not solving experimental quantum equipment problems, Sengupta teaches for USC Viterbi’s Department of Astronautical Engineering, where she is a research associate professor.

She looks forward to tackling new challenges the future will bring—landing on Venus perhaps?— and contributing to what she believes is NASA’s primary purpose: to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists.

“Whether it’s wondering if there are aliens out there, or they want to be an astronaut, or they love the way other planets look, [a lot of people] become interested in science and technology because of the space program,” she said. “Even though they might not become aerospace engineers, they first became inspired because of the space program. I would never have become an engineer if it wasn’t for the space program.”

§

OBITUARIES “If you’re going through adversity, keep going.”

That was Xinran Ji’s way of solving problems, according to Jiaming Kong, a close friend from his undergraduate days at Zhejiang University in China.

Ji, a graduate student in electrical engineering, who tragically lost his life on July 24, is remembered by friends as “amiable, willing to help all the time” and possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of bikes, cars, trains and planes. He could name each model of Chinese railway engine from the oldest to the latest bullet trains. He was someone “always smiling, modest, positive and hardworking.”

But it was that last part that particularly stood out to Kong, who saw in his friend “a young star who had a passion about his work,” an engineer who showed “unremitting effort in putting pieces together and making them dance.”

Said Kong, “As an engineer at work, I know how often people will cut corners, hack things and leave a potential for instability risk in the future. Yet I found none of these in his portfolio.”

Even before entering the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in fall 2013, Ji had distinguished himself. His undergraduate research in the design and implementation of control systems for quad-rotor aircraft earned him a First-class Scholarship for Excellence in Research and Innovation from Zhejiang University in December 2012.

Before that, in 2006, Ji had been No. 1 in the High School Admission Competition in his hometown of Hohhot, an extremely competitive exam similar to the American SATs. Indeed, Ji’s love of building things told the tale of an evolving, gifted engineer. There was a simple and elegant feed forward controller model; a car that navigates itself by seeing in infrared; a clock that tells international time in a more human way; and finally a drone that can park itself, fly sideways and stabilize its aerial position automatically.

According to Danlei Chen, another close friend and fellow USC Viterbi master’s student in electrical engineering, Ji believed wholeheartedly in the Theodore von Karman quote: “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.”

While fellow students traveled abroad and spoke of tourist attractions, Ji spoke of “automated production lines and advanced FANUC manipulators” during his 2011 exchange visit to UC Davis.

Said Kong, “His eyes shined as if he was still marveling at those things.”

In Memoriam:

X I N RA N J I 19 9 0–2014

Yet Ji was also the model of the USC Viterbi engineer, one that in the words of Dean Yannis C. Yortsos “combines analytical and mathematical skills with creativity and synthesis: a balanced blend of left and right-brain skills.”

An avid photographer, Ji had served as senior press photographer of the QSC website, a student portal ranked among the top 100 student sites in China. He loved outdoor photography, perhaps owing to his home province in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, an area known for its epic grasslands and forests.

In the end, Ji often saw the world through his camera lens. And that world, lovely and imperfect, was one that he perhaps was uniquely qualified to make better.

To honor Ji’s memory, the Xinran Ji Memorial Scholarship will be awarded annually to a USC Viterbi graduate student from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau.

To donate, please contact Jane Ong at (213) 821-2921 or via email at jane.ong@usc.edu.

PROFESSOR EMERITUS GERALD NADLER, 90, Gerald Nadler, professor emeritus of USC Viterbi’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the IBM Chair Emeritus in Engineering Management, died July 28. He was 90.

Nadler was a worldwide leader in industrial and systems engineering. He made key contributions in multidisciplinary system planning and design methodologies, and in the teaching of technological literacy to non-engineering students. Nadler served as ISE chair from 1983 to 1993.

Joining USC in 1983, he authored more than 225 articles and 15 books, and delivered more than 900 presentations worldwide. One of his books, Breakthrough Thinking: Why We Must Change the Way We Solve Problems, and the Seven Principles to Achieve This, has been translated into 10 languages.

Nadler was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986 and selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society of Engineering Education. He also served as president of the Institute of Industrial Engineers from 1989 to 1990.

JOHN CHOMA, professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. He passed away the morning of August 10, 2014.

Choma joined the USC faculty in 1980 and was promoted to Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1991. He was well known for his outstanding teaching. He received the school’s teaching award in 1984. He was also recognized by other organizations on campus with the Tau Beta Pi teaching award in 1983, the Mortar Board teaching award in 1984, and the Eta Kappa Nu teaching award in 1987. He was a teaching fellow at the USC Center of Excellence in Teaching in 1991 and was named Outstanding Professor in 1998 and 1999 by the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

For the many students and colleagues who had the pleasure of working with him, Choma was a positive force who brought out the best in those around him. He took immense pride in his students and helped them to achieve their educational aspirations.

49

EDITORIAL

WE ARE AT (CYB ER ) WA R How to build our national defense in the escalating struggle against cyber terrorism and espionage.

By Terry Benzel We face threats that are rapidly increasing in scope and sophistication. As was made painfully clear by the revelations of military incursions (by the “Shanghai Group” or “Comment Crew”) into U.S. systems, we now face state-sponsored cyber sleuthing and cyber terrorism. This unstable environment includes targeted attacks by ad hoc organizations and global cyber-crime syndicates that are escalating their operations against systems that are critical to our national safety and security.

Cybersecurity is a constant, serious and accelerating challenge in every facet of American society. We have become completely dependent on cyber capabilities and, as a result, highly vulnerable to wide-ranging threats. Where these once were largely annoying hacker probes and network intrusions, we now face organized crime and state-sponsored cyber terrorism. Despite many years of research, we are still on the losing side of an asymmetric battle. These dynamics must be changed to protect U.S. government information, corporate trade secrets, and public health and safety, among other vital concerns. New approaches to research and development must be energized, and new findings must be based in hard experimental science to support crucial cybersecurity discovery, validation and ongoing analysis. We must carry out a coordinated program across multiple sectors of our society to change our posture.

1. Increase the breadth and scope of cybersecurity R&D, and create opportunities for multidisciplinary research.

Too often, cybersecurity research is narrowly focused on a few specific areas of investigation.

For example, our community includes scientists conducting very good research on distributed denial-of-service threats, Internet worms, botnets and Internet routing attacks. Researchers typically specialize in just one of these well-known areas, where innovative countermeasures, protection and hardening are extremely valuable. Unfortunately, our adversaries also are doing R&D and are planning their attack scenarios without any of the same constraints. They are looking across multiple

50 Fall 2014

threat vectors for system vulnerabilities, within and across different technologies, and picking targets for their strategic value, not simply because they are easy marks. Thus, our adversaries are constructing attacks that combine multiple areas into even more potent, multifaceted weapons.

Studying broadly within our own disciplines is not enough. Cybersecurity is no longer solely an engineering issue. It requires deep involvement from economists, sociologists, anthropologists and others to create the holistic research agendas that can anticipate and guide effective cyber-defense strategies.

2. Formulate a research strategy/agenda to develop open, broad, multi-organizational cybersecurity experimentation and testing capabilities.

Looking forward, it is clear that cybersecurity R&D must be grounded in the same systematic approach to discovery and validation that is routine in other scientific and technological disciplines.

To approach these challenging research problems, we must create a paradigm shift in experimental cybersecurity. Only by enabling demonstrable, repeatable experimental results can we provide a sound basis for researchers to leverage prior work and create new capabilities not yet imaginable. Tomorrow’s researchers must be able to stand on the shoulders of today’s researchers, not be consigned to treading the same ground.

3. Develop new models of technology transfer operation, funding, partnership and cultural change within organizations.

Technology transfer is particularly difficult in the constantly shifting world of cybersecurity. At each stage—from initial research idea, to

advanced prototype, to early-stage product to widespread adoption—the process can break due to internal factors or sudden shifts in attack methodologies, tools and strategies. The net effect is that many potentially valuable security technologies never see the light of day. Commercializing security technologies in some cases has been largely a matter of chance.

4. Increase educational programs in cybersecurity research and development, with an emphasis on doctoral degrees.

The U.S. needs deep intellectual resources to fundamentally change the cyber-threat dynamic.

In addition to creating, cataloging and monitoring training programs, we need to be prepared to make significant investments in higher education. I applaud the efforts of the National Science Foundation and other federal research agencies to create and fund cybersecurity research and education grants. These fundamental research endeavors are the essential catalyst for research breakthroughs. Only by educating the next generation of researchers and educators today can we build the intellectual resources vital to solving tomorrow’s problems.

Taken together, these four recommendations form the basis for a multipronged, sustainable national program to address cyber R&D challenges, and to pursue the most promising approaches to a new order for research, development and innovation partnerships.

Terry Benzel is deputy director for the Computer Networks Division at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI)). She is also the technical project lead for the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research (DETER) testbed projects funded by DHS, NSF and DARPA.

I L LU S T R AT I O N : J O S E H E R N A N D E Z

LOLZ

Quantum Land Quantum mechanics deals with the incredibly small world of matter and energy. The rules of physics that we know and love work differently in Quantum Land.

By Katie McKissick

MEET THE LOCALS! really tiny A photon is a bundle of light energy. Right now, photons are striking your retina so you can read this.

Ph ot o n

Ele

c tro n

An electron is one of the particles in an atom. It’s negatively charged and weighs a whopping 9 x 1031 kg.

LEARN THEIR CUSTOMS! Electrons and photons sometimes behave like particles, and other times they act like energy waves.

Ugh, it’s them again.

Hm. Which one should I be today?

And it gets weirder. Trying to observe what electrons and photons are doing changes their behavior. It’s like they know we’re watching.

They’re a bit indecisive.

Electrons can even move through energy barriers, which would be like us walking through walls. It’s called quantum tunneling.

And you can’t know something’s speed and position at the same time.

I do what I want!

Where were you?

You missed my birthday party.

Hm, not sure. But I can tell you how fast I was going.

I L LU S T R AT I O N : K AT I E M C K I S S I C K

I love lasers.

And on the horizon is the glorious rainbow of quantum computing, where we harness the power of quantum mechanics to unleash computing power beyond our wildest dreams!

M COMP TU

ING UT

Understanding more about Quantum Land will open up a whole new small-scale, big-idea world of possibilities.

We already use technology that operates in the quantum realm with things like transistors, diodes and lasers.

QUAN

WORK TOGETHER !

51

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

THE MANY LIVES OF ENGINEERS

“For engineers like us, making cakes is both a chance to explore our artistic sides and to apply engineering principles to something artistic!”

— TRINA GREGORY, senior lecturer, USC Viterbi, and JASON GREGORY

52 Fall 2014

PHOTOS: NOE MONTES

“Leveraging physics to maneuver my body to control momentum in my spins, balance difficult poses, and combining all this with artistic expression, feeds my addiction to the aerial arts.”

— JOSIE MANZANO, B.S. ISE ’88 on aerial fitness

53

CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

“Ballet is very technical, and like with engineering, you have to have a strong foundation on the basics before you can learn the hard, fun things.”

— CHRISTINA MILANES, USC Viterbi senior, co-founder, USC DANSCOLLABORATIVE

54 Fall 2014

PHOTO: IAN ELSTON

“Improvised music has shown me the value of letting go, pushing creative frontiers, and not worrying about possibly failing in the end. In my mind, the best music and research is often the result of being willing to take risks and not being hampered by one’s own comfort zone.”

— GEORGE BAN-WEISS, USC Viterbi assistant professor, Sonny Astani Deptartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering

55

THE LAST WORD

Q A:

Buzz Aldrin, Astronaut and Engineer

Editor’s Note: Since 2004, Aldrin has been a visiting judge at USC Viterbi’s ASTE527: “Space Concepts Studio,” led by Madhu Thangavelu.

You’ve said that the president who commits to permanent life on an extraterrestrial planet will go down as one of the greatest in history. If you were in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama, what would be your pitch to commit to a permanent colony?

Well, due to timing and world conditions, Obama may not be in the best position right now to make that kind of commitment. It’s my opinion, and given the opportunity, I would mention that the 50th anniversary [of the moon landing] in July of 2019 would be a very appropriate time for a new president facing a reelection in a year and a half to reflect back 50 years on the significant benefits that accrued from the space program and its commitment to lead the world by sending a man to the moon and bringing him back. Not to mention the developments that followed the Apollo program, which include the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz international cooperative mission between two Cold War adversaries.

Tell us a bit about Mars and your “Unified Space Vision.” What do you think is a realistic timeline for a human landing on either the Martian moons or Mars itself?

I believe very strongly that the first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth.

They should be the beginning of a buildup of a permanent colony or settlement. If we are not willing to do that, then I don’t think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop. This should not be a massive design reference mission—one mission and its launch components that then carry out the mission and do whatever follows. I am calling for what should be renamed an evolutionary pioneering exploration sequence. We need an entirely new spacecraft that I call the Exploration Module, or XM. Unlike the Orion capsule, which is designed for short flights around the Earth and to the moon, the XM would contain the radiation shields, artificial gravity, food production and recycling facilities necessary for a spaceflight of up to three years. This exploration sequence could

56 Fall 2014

Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon on July 21, 1969. Forty-five years later, his “Unified Space Vision” eyes a permanent settlement on Mars. start at the present time or perhaps 2020, and go up until 2040. And in the sequence I have laid out, we would reach Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, in 2032, occupy it for a year and a half, and then return. A second crew would occupy the moon of Mars for a year and half, and then it too would return to Earth; and a third crew would get there around 2037, and it would stay there and not return to Earth, but it would land just before the permanent landing comes direct from Earth, so the next landings would take place in 2039.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently remarked that mining rare earth elements in space might yield the world’s first trillionaire. What are your thoughts about the potential economic upsides of space?

Well, I suspect that there will be many shareholders who have invested in a commercial company. I don’t believe it will be a government employee who makes the trillion dollars, and perhaps rightly so—it will be a commercial resource, and that resource could be ice crystals or water if it’s been separated into hydrogen and oxygen for consumption on the surface. But more important, at I think the near side of the moon’s libration point—a sort of gravitational parking space—we would have also a Mars exploration vehicle permanently located that would grow into a fuel depot started by the government but completed by commercial activities, which would then gather the ice crystals from the very cold, eternally dark craters; separate the water; package it for launch to this location, where the continuous sunlight would then electrolyze the water into hydrogen and oxygen for marketing to spacecraft from nations that need refueling.

There’s a profit to be made out of such a simple thing as ice or water.

You were an inspiration to a lot of kids. Who do you see as the space heroes of 2014?

Me. (laughs) Other than yourself?

There are not too many people who have been in space-heroic activities. In the early days, activities on the shuttle were limited to Low Earth Orbit and the space station, and of course many contributions have been of significance and it’s hard to categorize which ones of these people are more widely known for their broadcasting or picture taking from the shuttle or the station, or their contributions to the science discoveries that haven’t made a lot of headlines. What makes the headlines is failures of the shuttle system, problems with the space station and unique broadcasts from the station crew during their long stay at the station. The Canadian [Chris] Hadfield comes to mind as more popular to the general public.

For most of us, life is pretty routine, but you have walked on the moon, you’ve been a fighter pilot, you’ve shot down MIGs in Korea. When you’ve known such extremes of sensation and experience, how do you keep from being underwhelmed by the rest of daily life?

Well, I occasionally go to the North Pole on a nuclear icebreaker with the Russians. I’ve been down in a French yellow submarine with two Frenchmen and we spent some time looking at the Titanic. I’ve been diving in the ocean since 1957, and because of that experience I was a convenient but strong supporter and the first astronaut to train underwater in order to better prepare for the intricate space walks on Gemini 12 and duties of maintenance while in space. So that was an unexpected contribution. My more visible, and perhaps influential, contribution, by the way, was my doctoral thesis at MIT dealing with the techniques of manned orbital rendezvous, which were adopted, expanded on and perfected by NASA, and utilized still somewhat today with much more computerized sensor inputs so that the crew does not get involved in monitoring and using pencil or pen and charts to calculate backup maneuvers in the event of certain components failing in the rendezvous.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BUZZ ALDRIN

Buzz Aldrin

Why is it important that we be an interplanetary species?

Well, what was the motivation of the people from Europe who came on the Mayflower not to return from Plymouth Rock but to stay here and to begin to build up a North American civilization? Many of the reasons are somewhat similar to the basic pioneering urge: doing things that people have not done before. Think about it: hundreds of thousands of years of evolution of humans on this third planet from the sun to a technical point where we could visit briefly a natural satellite of the Earth, and then venture to occupy another planet that is much, much more habitable than the moon of Earth with its long days and long nights and high temperature swings and no atmosphere. It is human nature to reach beyond, to explore, to advance in technology and achievements and social interaction, historical achievements. I certainly believe that an individual with billions and billions of dollars could finance a private venture to Mars, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think you’re going to find that person, I don’t think you’re going to find the necessary equipment. But it should happen by a collection of nations on Earth coming together, with, I feel, the need of strong leadership by one nation.

It’s interesting that you brought that up, because what role do you see for private space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin? I mean, how far away are we from a Dutch East India Company in space?

Well, [Dutch] East India grew a product, tea, which was sold; maybe they did a lot of other things too.

There certainly are resources… . Flights into sub-orbital conditions, I don’t call that space, and I don’t believe the passengers should be called astronauts.

To me, they are star flyers—“star” standing for “space transportation, affordable, reusable.” I don’t believe that the national title of cosmonaut, taikonaut or astronaut should be applied to space passengers— they’re not really passengers, they’re participants. I would call their project not Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin but Star Quest—space transportation, affordable, reusable—and it’s a quest for progress. There may be other words, but that would be my nomination.

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