Polymathic Pizza: Technology and Our Well-Being

Aroussiak Gabrielian is a scholar-practitioner working across the fields of Landscape Architecture and Media Arts. Her scholarship focuses on both materialist perspectives on the living world of landscape matter, and the practice of imaging and imagining landscape, addressing both landscape’s material and its representation.  

Aroussiak is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and a consultant for futures oriented design work. Her speculations on alternative environmental futures have received numerous recent recognitions, including the Emerging Designer Awards from the Design Futures Initiative, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the World Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. 

Aroussiak is Co-founder and Design Director of foreground design agency, a critical landscape practice which works to dismantle structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent. 

 Aroussiak holds a dual masters in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D in Media Arts + Practice from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. Prior to initiating her own practice, she worked at Snøhetta, in New York City, and taught at University of Pennsylvania and University of Toronto.

Aroussiak is presently Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts + Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts. She recently launched and currently directs the Landscape Futures Lab, which serves as a design-research incubator for climate innovation and imagination.

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan holds appointments as professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, pediatrics and otolaryngology — head and neck surgery. Prior to USC, he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research.

As vice president for presidential initiatives, he provides intellectual leadership for transformative cross-cutting interdisciplinary initiatives of the president and the university in close partnership with the president’s senior leadership team and the deans of the cognizant schools. This includes the critical “moonshot” priorities and their intersections, setting the agenda and their ethical foundations, and connecting, coordinating and integrating talent, ideas and strengths across disciplines, schools and functional units. 

Narayanan’s interdisciplinary research focuses on developing engineering approaches to understand the human condition and in creating human-centered computing technologies to support and enhance human experiences across applications with direct societal relevance including in defense/intelligence, health, education, media and the arts.

He is a fellow at the Acoustical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors.

Narayanan is a Guggenheim Fellow and member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and he is a recipient of many awards for research and education, including the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, the Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the Engineers’ Council Distinguished Engineering Educator Award and the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History. He has served the broader scientific community in numerous ways, including as the inaugural vice president for education for the IEEE Signal Processing Society and as an editorial board member for several journals including as an editor for the Computer Speech and Language journal and editor-in-chief for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. He has published widely (with over 1,000 papers), and his inventions and patents have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded on conversational AI services and technology-supported mental health care quality delivery and quality assurance. 

He received his doctorate and master’s in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. His bachelor’s is in electrical and electronics engineering from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University, Madras, India.