Engineering the Future: Polymathic Perspectives

Feb 26 2013
When: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Harman Academy
Event Type: Special Events and Series

Event Details

Without engineering, there is no future, and an engineer will be the first to tell you that.  Join in conversation engineers Shrikanth Narayanan, Andrew Viterbi Professor of Engineering, and Maja Mataric, Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics, Viterbi School of Engineering, as they assess the ongoing invention of the future by – who else? – engineers.  University Professor Kevin Starr will moderate.


Pizza will be provided.

Speaker Information

Speaker

Shri Narayanan

Shri Narayanan is the Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering and holds joint appointments in computer science, linguistics, and psychology. Professor Narayanan is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Eta Kappa Nu, and he holds the first Viterbi Professorship in Engineering at USC. Professor Narayanan’s research interests are truly polymathic and focus on signals and systems modeling with an interdisciplinary emphasis on speech, audio, language, multimodal and biomedical problems and applications with direct societal relevance.

Maja Mataric

Maja J Mataric, professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics, serves as Vice Dean for Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She is the founding director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems and the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab. Her Interaction Lab performs research into socially assistive robotics aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people through non-contact monitoring, coaching, motivation, and training; her work has been successfully tested with stroke patients, Alzheimer's patients, healthy elderly, and children with autism spectrum disorders. Her research displays her polymathic interests as she combines engineering, psychology, sociology, and medicine to make advances in robotics.