It’s a difficult choice: Go hungry or go it alone. When soldiers are weighed down on the battlefield by food supplies and the heavy battery packs that power their communication equipment, they often choose to ditch the rations. It’s a sacrifice made to keep devices powered up and communication lines open in the field. Smaller, […]
USC Scientists Find a Way to Enhance the Performance of Quantum Computers
USC scientists have demonstrated a theoretical method to enhance the performance of quantum computers, an important step to scale a technology with potential to solve some of society’s biggest challenges. The method addresses a weakness that bedevils performance of the next-generation computers by suppressing erroneous calculations while increasing fidelity of results, a critical step before […]
Could This Material Enable Autonomous Vehicles To Come To Market Sooner?
One of the leading challenges for autonomous vehicles is to ensure that they can detect and sense objects–even through dense fog. Compared to the current visible light-based cameras, infrared cameras can offer much better visibility through the fog, smoke or tiny particles that can scatter the visible light. Within the air, infrared light –within a […]
AI Computer Vision Breakthrough IDs Poachers In Less Than Half A Second
Thousands of animals including elephants, tigers, rhinos, and gorillas are poached each year. Researchers at the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society have long been applying AI to protect wildlife. Initially, computer scientists were using AI and game theory to anticipate the poachers’ haunts, and now they have applied artificial intelligence and deep learning […]
A Dash Of Gold Improves Microlasers
Gold. The word brings to mind wedding rings, buried treasure and California in the 1840’s. But when gold is reduced to 1/100,000 the size of a human hair, it takes on an entirely new personality. By attaching gold nanoparticles to the surface of a microlaser, researchers in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering demonstrated a […]
Can AI Prevent The Spread Of HIV In Homeless Youth?
There are nearly 2 million youth who spend at least one night homeless each year in the United States. An estimated 7 percent of homeless youth are likely to be HIV positive. Researchers from the USC Center for AI for Society (CAIS), a joint research initiative between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the […]
USC To Lead IARPA Quantum Computing Project
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has selected the University of Southern California to lead a consortium of universities and private companies to build quantum computers that are at least 10,000 times faster than the best state-of-the-art classical computers. USC will lead the effort among various universities and private contractors to design, build and test […]
Looking For The Next Leap In Rechargeable Batteries
USC researchers may have just found a solution for one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the next wave of rechargeable batteries — small enough for cellphones and powerful enough for cars. In a paper published in the January issue of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, Sri Narayan and Derek Moy of the USC Loker […]
The Key to Mass-producing Nanomaterials
Nanoparticles – tiny particles 100,000 times smaller than the width of a strand of hair – can be found in everything from drug delivery formulations to pollution controls on cars to HD TV sets. With special properties derived from their tiny size and subsequently increased surface area, they’re critical to industry and scientific research. They’re […]
New Portable Device Could Test How ‘Squishy’ Cancerous Tumors Are
Tumors come in all shapes, sizes … and squishiness. And it turns out that matters, if you want to know how to treat them. USC engineers have created a backpack-sized instrument that can gently smush a wide range of materials, accurately quantifying the Young’s modulus — the scientific way to say “squishiness.” Preliminary testing has […]
