Innovations in the social sciences impact how we view our world, and perhaps more importantly, how we view each other. Below is a small sampling of exciting spinouts, labs, and projects in social sciences at USC:

Syncromatics Corporation is a privately held California company started in 2006, with the goal of bringing utility to both riders and operators by increasing efficiency and the availability of real-time information. Syncromatics utilizes GPS and cellular networks together with Google Maps to deliver a comprehensive Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) service which delivers end-to-end visibility of all aspects of a transit operation. Syncromatics Corporation, a leading provider of bus tracking systems for transit agencies and universities, was selected as the winner of the Lexus Transportation Award in the 2007 California Clean Tech Open. The California Clean Tech Open is the nation's pre-eminent business competition for clean technology startups in six different categories. Each category winner receives a startup-in-a-box award including a $50,000 cash award as well as professional and business services valued at more than $50,000.

Alelo is the Hawaiian word for language, and is also the name of the parent company of an innovative videogame designed to educate military officers in the language and culture of other countries. Conceived as a research project in 2003 at USC's Information Sciences Institute by faculty members Richard Koffler, W. Lewis Johnson, and Andre Valente, the Tactical Language Training systems provide an immersive environment to simulate real-life interaction that allow trainees to learn communication skills within hours of play via interactive 3D video games involving spoken dialogs and cultural protocols with socially intelligent virtual humans.” A version for Iraqi Arabic is currently in use by the U.S. armed forces, with plans to design courses in Gulf Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, and English as a second language.

The Prometheus Institute, started by USC law students Rand Getlin and Matt Harrison, is dedicated to the creative marketing of libertarian ideas to the broader lay public, especially the youth. Furthermore, the institute works to discover practical public policy solutions to solve pressing national issues and reduce the burden of government on the people; advance free market principles; create public demand for these policy ideas and help strengthen American democracy. Unique among all think tanks, the Prometheus Institute also advocates its ideas directly to the people of the United States and the world, competitively and creatively marketing publications, research and outreach.

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.

Imagine viewing high-resolution inscriptions from the ancient world right from your computer screen. Through the InscriptiFact Project, a database of more than 100,000 images including text from the Dead Sea Scrolls and cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, you can. The USC School of Religion's West Semitic Research Project was one of the first participants in the project, and its researchers are using a computer imaging technique called patching to help realign torn pieces of text into its original form.

CREATE the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events - is the first university center of excellence funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security The Center is focused on risk and economic analysis of the U.S. and comprises a team of experts from across the country, including partnerships with New York University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. CREATE was formed to assess the risks of terrorism, to develop tools for analyzing economic and societal consequences of terrorist attacks, and to provide guidance on investments to counter terrorism and make the nation safer.