Innovations in the social sciences impact how we view our world, and perhaps more importantly, how we view each other. 

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. 

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, 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. 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.

As the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles, responsible for $4 billion annually in economic activity in Los Angeles County alone, USC is dedicated to serving its community. In 1992, USC committed itself to a series of community initiatives designed to form active partnerships with neighborhood schools and businesses. The result included the launch of such innovative programs as the USC Kid Watch, where nearly 1,000 neighbors volunteer to watch over the 9,000 school children in the USC neighborhoods as they go to and from school, and the Good Neighbors Campaign, where USC staff and faculty have contributed more than $7 million to fund joint university-community projects.

Illumin Magazine is an online publication whose mission is to explain the impact of engineering practice on everyday life. Illumin's content is entirely student-created. Articles are selected from the USC Viterbi School of Engineer's advanced writing course by an editorial staff comprising five engineering undergraduate students. The magazine has worldwide readership and its articles are referenced in academic and commercial publications.

The Digital Design Program is a social enterprise intervention (SEI) specifically designed for homeless and street-living young adults (ages 18-24) in Los Angeles with mental health issues, such as depression, and limited service utilization.  The SEI is an innovative interdisciplinary intervention for addressing youth homelessness given the lack of existing programs that combine job training with clinical services and promote teamwork among homeless youth.  The SEI is also a strengths-based approach to youth homelessness that builds upon the youths' existing vocational skills and strengths.   Designed to equip these young people with vocational skills along with marketing, budgeting and accounting skills to facilitate their involvement in a vocational cooperative (i.e., small business), The SEI provides supportive mentoring and social service referrals throughout the program.   

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.