News - 2017
Two ISI Division Directors Named ACM Fellows for Transformative Contributions to Technology
December 23, 2017
ISI division directors Carl Kesselman and Craig Knoblock have been named 2017 Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) Fellows for their “landmark contributions to computing.” Kesselman and Knoblock were among the top one percent of ACM members worldwide honored this year for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology.
Read More >ISI's Networking Group Creates Interactive Internet Outages Heatmap
December 7, 2017
Researchers at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) Analysis of Network Traffic Lab are creating a geographic internet outages map to report the time, location, and severity of internet service outages around the world.
Read More >What lies beneath: “PipeFish” robot patrols city pipes to detect underground water leaks
November 27, 2017
The United States faces a looming crisis over its deteriorating water infrastructure, and fixing it will be a monumental and expensive task. In Los Angeles alone, about two thirds of the city's 7,000 miles of water pipes are more than 60 years old and nearing the end of their useful lives.
Read More >Graduate student profile: Emily Sheng, PhD candidate
November 22, 2017
Meet PhD candidate Emily Sheng, who is researching how natural language processing could revolutionize how knowledge is accessed in scientific literature.
Read More >One tool to rule them all: ISI postdoctoral researcher’s ontology wizard wins best paper award
November 14, 2017
ISI postdoctoral researcher Daniel Garijo has received a Best Paper Award in the Resources Track at the 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Vienna, Austria.
Read More >ISI awarded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site by NSF
November 10, 2017
ISI has been selected to serve as a host institution for the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.
Read More >Carl Kesselman to help develop a powerful national NIH Data Commons Platform
November 7, 2017
Carl Kesselman, an ISI Fellow and Informatics Systems Research Division director, is participating in the pilot phase of an ambitious new National Institutes of Health (NIH) data initiative to make it simpler for scientists to share and manage research data online.
Read More >Seven things you didn't know about the internet: Q & A with ISI's John Heidemann
October 27, 2017
On October 29, 1969, the internet was born. Forty-eight years
later, its influence on the world is ubiquitous. In 2017, the
number of internet users around the world has surpassed three
billion, connecting 50 percent of the world's population.
Read More >
USC ISI to Lead Project to Simulate Dynamics of Online Social Behavior
October 23, 2017
USC's Information Sciences Institute will lead a $4.95 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative among universities to develop large-scale simulations of online behavior in complex social networks.
Read More >ISI computer scientist participates in Heidelberg Laureate Forum
October 18, 2017
ISI computer scientist Fred Morstatter was among 200 top
students and early-career researchers selected to participate in
the 2017 Heidelberg Laureate Forum in
Heidelberg, Germany.
Read More >
ISI's Pegasus Program Contributed to New Gravitational-Wave Detector Discovery
October 16, 2017
A collaboration that began 16 years ago between computer
scientists at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and
members of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave
Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo projects is opening up a new
window onto the nature of the universe.
Read More >
USC ISI Leads IARPA Contract for developing Hybrid Forecasting Systems
October 10, 2017
A research team led by the Information Sciences Institute
(ISI) at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of
Engineering has received a four-year, multi-million dollar IARPA
grant to develop a human-machine hybrid forecasting system.
Read More >
Nobel Prize-winning discovery on gravitational waves came about with contributions from ISI computer scientists
October 9, 2017
The Nobel Prize-winning discovery that gravitational waves exist in the universe, which in turn further confirmed Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, was made possible in part by a collaboration with USC computer scientists.
Read More >USC ISI researchers poised to crack the code on reducing workplace stress
October 3, 2017
To combat stress in the workplace, you first need to understand why it happens. That's the aim of a groundbreaking new study underway at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering, in collaboration with Keck Medicine of USC and USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Read More >ISI's Senior Director for Administrative Affairs Receives 2017 Distinguished Service Award from Digital Government Society
October 2, 2017
The Digital Government Society has recognized Yigal Arens, USC
ISI's Senior Director for Administrative Affairs, for his long and
"sustained service and tireless dedication" to digital government.
Read More >
TechCrunch: Researchers find that Twitter bots can be used for good.
September 25, 2017
A study co-authored by ISI researcher Emilio Ferrara found that
Twitter bots can be used to run interventions that trigger or foster
good behaviors.
Read More
Twitter Bots for Good: USC ISI Study Reveals How Information Spreads on Social Media
September 22, 2017
After an election year marked by heated exchanges and the
distribution of fake news, Twitter bots earned a bad
reputationâ&euro"but not all bots are bad, suggests a new study
co-authored by Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences
Institute computer scientist and a research assistant professor
in the department of computer science at the USC Viterbi
School
of Engineering.
Read More >
A Beautiful Find: Facilitating Schizophrenia Research
September 19, 2017
Think "big data," and schizophrenia research probably isn't the
first subject that comes to mind. But that's exactly what a
USC Information Sciences Institute team is pursuing. Part of a
national coalition to foster novel schizophrenia research, ISI is
making brain-imaging data far easier to access and integrate
across disparate sources â&euro" including relational, specialized
neuroimaging and clinical patient databases.
Read More >
Science Magazine: Social media 'bots' tried to influence the U.S. election. Germany may be next
September 14, 2017
Research by ISI's Emilio Ferrara, which examined the use of bots
during the US presidential election campaign, was highlighted in
this story about the upcoming elections in Germany.
Read More
New York Magazine: What Happens When Your Face Is Your Password?
September 14, 2017
Prem Natarajan, ISI's Michael Keston Executive Director, was
interviewed about issues related to the use of facial-verification
as a mode of authentication.
Read More
ISI Recognizes Two Outstanding Summer Interns
September 14, 2017
Two Information Sciences Institute (ISI) summer interns, Chenyou Fan and Katayoun
Neshatpour, have been named ISI's Director's Interns, 2017, in recognition of their
exceptional research and dedication to creating innovative, impactful and potentially
game-changing technologies.
Read More >
XConomy: Hurricane Harvey, A Test-Bed for Internet Resilience
September 12, 2017
ISI's John Heidemann tracked internet outages related to
Hurricane Harvey, mapping the storm's destructive path as it
made landfall in Southeast Texas.
Read More
Everything a computer wanted to know about humans (But was too afraid to ask).
September 6, 2017
Computers can outperform the greatest minds in many
challenges, but while new approaches in machine learning are
making in huge strides, from
classifying images to understanding languages, machines still
fall short in other areas.
Read More >
USC ISI professor tracks Hurricane Harvey through the Eyes of the Internet
September 5, 2017
John Heidemann, a USC Information Sciences Institute
computer scientist and a research professor in the department
of
computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, is
mapping the destructive impact of Hurricane Harvey through
the eyes of the internet â&euro" by measuring the size and location
of internet outages as the storm hit southeast Texas last
week.
Read More >
ISI Team's AI Research Could Speed Language Translation — and Save Lives
August 22, 2017
Words matter. And in the wake of a crisis, understanding another
countryâ&euro&trades language is vital so that information never gets lost in
translation.
Read More >
A Rose is a Rose is an Algorithm: ISI Students Create Award-Winning Interactive Poetry Generator
August 22, 2017
If you need a little poetic inspiration, a team of three students
from USC's Information Sciences Institute has just the thing:
an interactive poetry generation
system, which recently won best demo award at the 2017
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference.
Read More >
ISI Publication Recognition Awards Celebrate Stellar Research
August 18, 2017
ISI's Publication Recognition Awards celebrate the Institute's
most prolific authors, whose research publications are fueling
discovery and innovation in numerous disciplines spanning
cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, science automation and
advanced electronics.
Read More >
LA Times: USC study finds that movies are still dominated by men, on- and off-screen
August 13, 2017
ISI researcher Shrikanth Narayanan's study on diversity and
stereotypes in movie dialogues is highlighted in the LA Times.
Read More
Bloomberg: Big Data Shows Big Promise in Medicine
August 13, 2017
ISI's Greg Ver Steeg was highlighted for his algorithm CorEx
which was used to help friend and computational biologist Shirley
Pepke find treatment options for her cancer diagnosis.
Read More
ISI Computer Scientist Wins Best Paper Award for Entity Resolution Breakthrough
August 7, 2017
ISI computer scientist Mayank Kejriwal has been awarded best
paper at the 2017 Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA)
Distinguished Dissertation Awards.
Read More >
In the News: Novel X-Ray Technique Maps Microchip in 3D
August 2, 2017
An ISI research team, led by Advanced Electronics division
director John Damoulakis, is developing techniques to clearly
image the smallest features in silicon integrated circuit chips
at a resolution of sub-10 nanometers (10 billionths of a
meter).
Read More >
Collaborating to Combat Cyberwar: DETER Team Wins Federal Government Award
July 25, 2017
Cyberwar knows no geographic boundaries, but neither does
ISI's
award-winning Cyber Defense Technology Experimental
Research
(DETER) group.
Read More >
Better Than Ever
July 24, 2017
ISI today attracts more federal research funding than at any
comparable time in its 45-year history. And the growing institute
recently opened a new office in Greater Boston.
Read More >
Unlocking the Gate: ISI Team Wins Recognition for New FPGA Approach
July 13, 2017
A team headed by Matthew French, a senior supervising
computer scientist at the
USC Information Sciences Institute, is garnering attention for
a novel approach to
coding field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips.
Read More >
WIRED: The Human Army Teaching Phones AI to Drive
July 10, 2017
Prem Natarajan, ISI's Michael Keston Executive Director, was
interviewed on the best strategies to develop artificial
intelligence.
Read More
San Diego Union Tribune: USC's Expanding Scientific Ambitions Include San Diego
July 8, 2017
ISI's Carl Kesselman is featured in an article about USC's
efforts to expand its imprint in the
biosciences. Kesselman was interviewed regarding his effort to
create a means for scientists to
organize data digitally.
Read More
Test Drive: Terry Benzel Joins California Transportation Commission Evaluation
July 7, 2017
California is known both for a cheery, idealized car culture and
the grinding reality of traffic and sometimes dangerously
polluted air. Undergirding those opposing images: 50,000
miles of aging roads, highways and freeways that continually
must be maintained and repaired with gas-tax funding.
Read More >
What's Going On: Answering Questions With Web Corpora
June 28, 2017
Pedro Szekely understands dark matter in an all-too-
human, not cosmological, universe. Beginning in 2015,
his work with Craig Knoblock on sophisticated,
cloud-based analytics has generated substantial media
attention for its ability to expose human trafficking hidden
deeply online.
Read More >
Root Matters: ISI Greatly Enhances Internet Root Server
June 12, 2017
The USC Information Sciences Institute launched a second
physical site of
the Internet root server it manages on May 2, greatly
boosting the
service's ability to fulfill an unusual, dual mandate.
Read More >
The Next Platform: Python Coils Around FPGAs for Broader Accelerator Reach
June 5, 2017
An ISI team has created a new platform that makes FPGAs more
usable and accessible for everyday domain scientists.
Read More
ISI Postdoctoral Scholar Chosen for Prestigious Program
May 12, 2017
Yonatan Bisk, a postdoctoral scholar and research associate
in ISI's intelligent systems
division, has been named to a novel program being
offered by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Read More >
ISI Researchers Recognized for Reproducibility
May 8, 2017
A 2013 journal paper co-authored by Information Sciences
Institute Director of Knowledge Technologies Yolanda Gil and
postdoctoral
student Daniel Garijo is among a handful of articles chosen
to represent the best of open-access publishing.
Read More >
John Heidemann and Student Win Best Paper
May 2, 2017
ISI research professor John Heidemann, together with post-doctoral scholar Ricardo de Oliveria Schmidt and masters student Jan Harm
Kuipers, both at the University of Twente (Netherlands), were awarded Best Paper at the 2017 Passive and Active Measurements (PAM)
conference in late March.
Read More >
What's Going On: Of Bots and Human Behavior
April 27, 2017
Emilio Ferrara's research on social bots was compelling even
before the current Congressional investigations into likely
Russian
hacks surrounding the 2016 US presidential election.
Read More >
Yigal Arens Receives Digital Government Honor
April 27, 2017
ISI Intelligent Systems Division Director Yigal Arens has been honored for distinguished service by the Digital
Government Society (DGS), which fosters innovative deployment of technology and information to support public
policy, upgrade government operations and engage citizens worldwide.
Read More >
What's Going On: Handling Sensor Changes and Failures
April 18, 2017
Craig Knoblock is best known for research on a large scale: semantic alignment of
data in the widely used open-source tool called Karma, geospatial mapping
techniques used by the Army in Iraq, collaboration on a commercial web data
extraction platform, and recent, groundbreaking progress on international human
trafficking with Pedro Szekely.
Read More >
What's Going On: Teaching Data Science with Data Science
March 28, 2017
Call it (data science)2. In a February, 2017 seminar, Jose
Luis Ambite
described a project that uses data science—a concept unifying
statistics, data analysis,
related methods and their results—to teach biomedical researchers
about
data science.
Read More >
Twitter Bot Analysis Receives Wide Media Coverage
March 16, 2017
An analysis of Twitter bots led by ISI's Emilio Ferrara is
garnering high-profile
media coverage around the globe.
Read More >
What's Going On: Heterogeneous Computing
March 9, 2017
Andrew Schmidt is in favor of lowering entry barriers in
computing-intensive fields, where fewer
obstacles translate into faster innovation.
Read More >
Bradley Fidler Named Postel Scholar
March 7, 2017
Bradley Fidler, an Internet researcher and historian at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has been
appointed a visiting scholar at ISI's Postel Center for
Experimental Networking.
Read More >
Spanish Newspaper Features ISI Fake Bots Analysis
February 15, 2017
Emilio Ferrara's work on fake
Twitter bots was reported in the February 11, 2017
edition
of El Periódico de Catalunya, a major
Spanish newspaper based in Barcelona.
Read More >
ISI Analysis of Jihadi Tweets Featured by MIT Technology Review
February 14, 2017
MIT Technology Review covered work by Adam Badawy and Emilio Ferrara
that used data mining to analyze Twitter messages by 25,000 ISIS supporters. In the February 10, 2017 issue, MIT
TR describes Badawy and Ferrara's exploration of 1.9 million tweets from now-closed accounts.
Read More >
Recipients of ISI's Institute Achievement Award Announced
January 24, 2017 ISI has presented Pedro Szekey, Ewa Deelman, and John Heidemann with an Institute Achievement Award in recognition of innovative and exemplary contributions to research at ISI. Awards were presented at ISI's annual holiday celebration on 16 December 2016. Read More >Clifford Neuman interviewed on KABC
January 23, 2017
Clifford Neuman was interviewed in January for a
ransomware
story by KABC about the ransomware attack at LA Valley
College,
in which the college paid $28,000 in bitcoins to unlock its
systems.
Read More >
SERC Creates Hands-On Tracking Course
January 23, 2017
The Space Engineering Research Center, a joint effort between
the USC Viterbi Astronautics Department and ISI, has just
launched a novel class on satellite-to-ground communication.
Read More >