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. Below is a small sampling of exciting spinouts, labs, and projects in engineering and the physical sciences at USC:

Dr. Peter Beerel thinks of himself as an average faculty member with an extraordinary opportunity: To take his research out of the lab and start his own company, TimeLess Design Automation. What began as a Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, and a continued as a USC Viterbi faculty dream has become a potentially seismic paradigm shift for the semiconductor industry. Beerel and his students have created software that enables chip designers to easily produce asynchronous” circuits, that is circuits that are not governed by a global clock signal, but instead wait for local signals to indicate completion of instructions and operations, a new approach that can significantly reduce power consumption and achieve unparalleled high performance.

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

Safety Dynamics specializes in the use of smart sensors for threat recognition and localization. Safety Dynamics is currently selling and supporting a system for law enforcement called SENTRI (Sensor Enabled Neural Threat Recognition and Identification). The high-tech surveillance system being rolled out in high crime urban areas to stem gun violence comes directly from a USC Viterbi School researcher’s pioneering brain studies. Dr. Theodore Berger, director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering who holds the David Packard Chair in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has spent much of his research life deciphering how nerve cells code messages to each other. Berger is also leading a project with the National Science Foundation’s Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center.

Sentinel AVE provides innovative technology products and services related to image analysis, scene modeling, and immersive visualization through 3D imagery rendering, recognition, and analysis software for companies involved in security and surveillance. The company was founded in 2005 by Professors in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at the University of Southern California (USC) including Dr. Ulrich Neumann and Dr. Suya You. Sentinel core technologies are the result of more than a decade of university research supported by government agencies including U.S. Army, Naval Research Office (ONR), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and several industry partners.

xRez, led by visiting professorin the USC School of Cinematic Arts Eric Hanson began a company committed to pioneering new creative techniques and opportunities rising from the advent of extremely high-resolution gigapixel digital photography. xRez refined a new technique of capturing gigapixel” levels of image resolution with conventional photographic gear in order to display images of extraordinary, unprecedented levels of detail. The results can be used for a myriad of purposes, from scientific inquiry, to web interaction, to visitor interpretation in the National Park system, to name a few.

Project:Possibility is a nonprofit, community service project committed to creating groundbreaking open source software for the disabled community. Their mission is to inspire a community of disabled persons and software developers to work together and make a difference by inventing software that will unlock new areas of life for persons with disabilities, giving them access to experiences previously impossible to achieve. Software projects developed by Project:Possibility include universal closed-captioning for the Internet, a search engine specifically geared toward finding software for people with disabilities, word prediction software for people with limited mobility, gesture-recognition software for those who have difficulty using keyboard and mouse, and a mobile currency reader for the visually impaired.

LEAPFROG is a working space vehicle, and an innovative risk reduction platform for small companies to explore/develop revenue generating business on the lunar surface.