Changing How We View Our World

Innovation is not isolated to technology and science. In fact, much of the innovation at USC stems from the incredibly rich and broad emphasis on media and the arts.

Expanding the language and art of storytelling is what makes USC's Labyrinth Project unique. Led by School of Cinematic Arts faculty member Marsha Kinder, Labyrinth staff collaborate with filmmakers, scientists, museum curators, archivists, and authors to leverage the power of multimedia to make narratives and documentaries intensely interactive. New projects include Koreatown: Characterizing the Global City which explores a community's changing identity and Documenting the Global City: Los Angeles, Beijing and Hong Kong, a cultural exchange between students from these cities who will produce digital documentaries to be showcased at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

In 1983, moviegoers worldwide experienced a new way to watch film with the premiere of Return of the Jedi and the introduction of THX.  Envisioned by renowned film director and USC alumnus George Lucas, and developed through the research of USC faculty member Tomlinson Holman and engineers from LucasFilm Ltd, THX opened a new chapter in film by creating a standard for theater audio systems that hadn't been updated since World War II. Today, THX has certified more than 4,000 theaters worldwide.

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) - George Lucas, Anthony Daniels © and TM 2002 Lucasfilm Lt

USC Thornton School of Music students aren't just performing music, they're influencing the future of the music industry through the Music Media Solutions Lab. Through the lab, students offer new ideas and fresh thinking for executives at such leading corporations as Warner Bros. Records and Emmis Broadcasting. Projects range from marketing strategies to new ways to rethink corporate philosophies in a business that is facing dramatic changes due to technology.

Making virtual characters appear more human has long been a hurdle for many special effects artists. At USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, faculty members have created a device, called a lightstage, to scan a person's face in order to create a computer graphic model. The lightstage photographs a human face, lit from different directions, and recovers a 3-D shape of the face. The result is a more realistic digital character capable of expressing a wide range of emotions and expressions. Sony Pictures leveraged the lightstage for its remake of the classic film King Kong.

USC's Master of Professional Writing Program is offering a new course, The Business of the Business. Geared to help USC students build self-directed, independent and sustainable careers, this intense course explores the use of innovation techniques, collaborating with experts who have complementary knowledge and skills.  The Business of the Business examines case studies, guest speaker expertise, best practice models and students' own work and experiences to create customized, actionable business plans to foster real world success, as defined by each student. Thrown into the deep end students must think "out-of-the-box" to succeed. But it goes further than that.  Many students, not liking the reality of the marketplace, actually develop business paradigms that can shift the markets in which they choose to compete.  Others develop innovations that allow them to leapfrog the competition.  Still others shift and adjust their "products" to meet untapped or overlooked demand.
USC's Master of Professional Writing program is a multidisciplinary graduate writing program, preparing students for careers in arts and business. We welcome applications from all schools.  To register for Business of the Business, please apply to MPW mpw@college.usc.edu or call 213-740-3250 for registration and additional information.

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, part of the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, maintains the largest publicly available database in the world (more than 10 petabytes in uncompressed form) and preserves the largest archive of digital video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. The Institute developed a licensable search engine technology that enables users to search the nearly 52,000 testimonies contained in the archive using a controlled vocabulary of 50,000 index terms. In addition, the names of 1.2 million people mentioned in the testimonies are indexed and searchable as well. Index terms are matched with one-minute segments of testimony; this enables users not only to search for entire testimonies relevant to their areas of interest, but also to identify specific segments within those testimonies. The Institute's technology delivers search results instantaneously in an intuitive interface that runs in a web browser. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute works with partners worldwide to use the testimonies for educational and scholarly purposes. In addition, the Institute provides access to the testimonies to universities, museums, archives, libraries, and other institutions. The Institute soon expects to begin collecting and indexing testimony on other genocides.