From color television and floppy disks, to future nanotech and robotics, USC engineers continue to blaze trails in engineering and physical sciences. Through our outstanding faculty, superb students, rich programs, loyal alumni and friends, and our unparalleled array of national research centers, USC continues to forge new paths in the creation and improvement of many technological systems and processes.

Real-time identification for international travelers, voters, and law enforcement has been made possible in part to the technical innovations at Cogent, Inc. Co-founded by USC alumnus Ming Hsieh, Cogent is a leading provider of automated fingerprint identification systems and is raising the standard for biometric technology. BusinessWeek magazine ranked Cogent number one in its “Best Small Companies 2005” special issue.

Ming Hsieh

The largest multidisciplinary center for robotics in Southern California, USC's Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems is moving robotics out of the lab into our homes and offices. Working with more than 60 robots – ranging from helicopters to humanoids – the Center is using imitation to enable robots to learn new skills and interact with humans more naturally. USC faculty member Maja Mataric leads an effort to develop a model of imitation inspired by how certain animals interpret behavior.

What is a world without color? Thanks to USC physics professor Willard Greer, the early years of black and white television became history with the invention of the Greer color tube. The television tube fired three beams of electrons, each representing a primary color, on a screen of small pyramids. Television viewers never looked back.

Dr. Peter A. Beerel has been heavily involved with a local start-up company in an effort to successfully commercialize asynchronous VLSI technology. After receiving tenure at USC in 2000, he started working at Asynchronous Digital Design as a consultant. When they became Fulcrum Microsystems, Inc in 2002, Dr. Beerel took a 2-year leave of absence from USC during which time he was Vice-President of CAD and Verification.  He remains a technical advisor to the company and is currently engaged in a joint research project to make this technology more accessible.

The first successful mass-produced personal computer, the Apple II, can contribute part of its success to USC alumnus Mike Markkula. As one of the co-founders of Apple in 1977, Markkula worked with Apple co-founder and engineer Steve Wozniak to design a disk drive for the use of floppy diskettes. The diskettes were to be used in lieu of cassette tapes to store program applications and data. The computers with the disk drives shipped a year later, and Apple II's popularity soared.