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April 13, 2010
University of Southern California
USC Bovard Auditorium

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TEDxUSC “Ideas Empowered” Conference

Think of TEDxUSC as a retreat with 1200 of your smartest friends. A time to explore new ideas, get inspired by visionary thinkers, and gain exposure to concepts and innovations you may not have ever seen before. A time to check-out from the day-to-day routine, and enter an afternoon of intellectual adventure.

And true to the format of the TED conference, TEDxUSC presenters will give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less.

TEDxUSC 2010 promises to be even more inspiring, jaw-dropping, and entertaining than ever before. The surprise presenter line-up will fascinate and delight guests, with mind-blowing technology demos, captivating talks, and stirring musical performances.

There are no breakout sessions. Everyone at TEDxUSC will share the same experience. Because of this, there are no “in-and-outs”. Once the doors close, they stay closed until the end.

TEDxUSC is an invitation-only event. To request an invitation for the 2010 TEDxUSC conference, click here.

WHAT HAPPENED AT TEDxUSC 2009?
As the first to pioneer the TEDx program, the University of Southern California is the place where it all began.

In 2009, the TEDxUSC “Ideas Empowered” conference brought the spirit of the TED conference to USC – hosting some of the world’s smartest thinkers, greatest visionaries, and most fascinating teachers to inspire a better understanding of the world and create a better future.

TEDxUSC reached nearly 50,000 people through outreach efforts, filled USC’s Bovard auditorium to capacity at 1200, and the four TEDxUSC talks that have been posted to TED.com have been seen by more than a half million people worldwide (that’s 6 Coliseums full!)

Since TEDxUSC 2009, we have helped to create a model for a worldwide TEDx experience, helping kick off a world-wide success story through hundreds of smaller “TEDx” events in over 60 different countries.

Here’s how the day will run:

FORMAL PROGRAM:
The TEDxUSC formal program takes place in USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Modeled after the TED Conference, TEDxUSC features a fast-paced afternoon of rapid-fire simulation and thought provoking interstitial content from talks, short films, musical performances and technology demos.

RECEPTION:
TEDxUSC reception immediately follows the formal program. Taking place at Town & Gown, just a short walk from Bovard, the reception is a highlight of the event, chock-full of interactive and highly engaging art installations, progressive media demos and other hands-on experiences. It’s a fully catered, engaging, and one of the most important parts of the TEDxUSC experience.

REGISTRATION and MUSIC IN THE PARK:
Pick up your badge early and join us for Music in the Park! During registration hour, TEDxUSC guests will enjoy a picnic lunch and live music in Alumni Park, right in front of Bovard. The live jazz ensemble includes students from the USC Thornton School of Music, and is hosted in partnership with USC Spectrum.
Sandwiches will be available for $5, and side salads will be available for $3. The picnic lunch is catered by Lemonade and subsidized by USC Spectrum.

CUSTOMER SERIVICE:
Questions
Elisa Schreiber
Please use email for all registration questions: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Please do not call with registration issues. Phone messages regarding registration will not be returned.

TICKET INFORMATION:
Ticket prices:
General Admission: $85
USC Faculty: $60
USC Students: $25

Tickets can be picked up at the registration booth before the event.

There are no refunds for tickets.

PRIVACY POLICY
USC is committed to the responsible use of personal information collected from and about students, faculty, staff, business partners and others who provide such information to us and in compliance with both state and federal regulations concerning the use of personal information.

Click here to download the USC Privacy Policy.

http://stevens.usc.edu/programs_grants.php

In an effort to enhance innovation in the classroom, the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation launched the first series of “Innovation Inside” curriculum grants. At $2000 each, these awards recognize selected faculty that are enhancing their existing undergraduate and/or graduate coursework in experimental ways to best foster a culture of innovation and cultivate innovative traits and skills in USC students. Developed as a pilot, this intentionally small and highly-selective grant program is designed to establish a diverse cadre of faculty who emphasize innovation in their curriculum, and are interested in exploring different ways to teach the process. At the culmination of the program, Innovation Inside” award recipients will deliver a short description of key findings from their project, as well as participate in a 1-day summit to share their experiences and lessons learned with other awardees, peers, mentors and innovators. Learn more about the 2007 award recipients.

 

http://stevens.usc.edu/programs_support.php

USC Law School Small Business Clinic
The USC Law School Small Business Clinic (SBC) provides basic corporate legal assistance to small businesses, entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations that cannot afford to pay market rates for legal services. The purpose of the SBC is to give students hands-on experience handling transactional legal problems while providing assistance to small business owners in the greater Los Angeles area. The SBC provides an opportunity for these businesses to get legal guidance on what type of entity to form and assistance in forming a corporation or an LLC, to implement legal protections and to obtain guidance in complying with a variety of legal requirements, without the high costs of business legal services. For more information, click here.

Every semester, the USC Stevens Institute helps to identify candidates for this clinic and selects eight students to become clients. If you would like to be considered for this program, please download the fill-in PDF application here and e-mail it to Polai Av at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with subject: USC SBC.

Keck School faculty member Jeffrey Upperman and Pharmacy Faculty members Roberta Diaz-Brinton, Bangyan Stiles and post-doc Jennifer-Ann Bayan are featured in a recently released report intended to show policymakers how American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding of medical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is improving health and the economy.

The “Investing in Discovery” report, produced by United for Medical Research (UMR), a coalition of leading research institutions, patient and health advocates, and private industry, was released just before the one-year anniversary of ARRA’s enactment. USC is a UMR member.

The report includes video stories from researchers, administrators and patients that demonstrate how the $10.5 billion infusion of funds is creating and preserving jobs, helping to reduce long-term health care costs, and laying the foundation for industry growth.

Upperman is director of the trauma program at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and an Associate Professor at the Keck School of Medicine. Brinton is professor of pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering at the School of Pharmacy, and the Director of the Center for Scientific Translation for the Los Angeles Basin Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (LAB-CTSI). Stiles is associate professor, pharmacology and pharmaceutical sciences.

To watch their video stories, visit http://www.investingindiscovery.com/#/scientiststories, then click on the proceed button.

By Krisztina “Z” Holly, Special to CNN
January, 29, 2010
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/29/holly.innovation.universities/

Editor’s note: Krisztina “Z” Holly is vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California and executive director of the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, where she leads a multidisciplinary approach to help faculty and students bring innovations to the market and develop their skills as innovators. She formerly served as the founding executive director of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.

(CNN)— On Monday, President Obama will post his much-anticipated federal budget for fiscal year 2011. And as America reviews the plan, few issues will be as critical as how it addresses job creation.

Fortunately, an opportunity to solve our job crisis lies right under our noses.

Currently, the federal government is investing nearly $50 billion a year on university research—yet barely a dime on university programs to help translate the most promising ideas into new businesses and employment opportunities. That’s like turning up the water pressure but never opening up the faucet.

Thought leaders in academia, industry, and the public sector have collaborated to develop a policy proposal called IMPACT, which I recently presented at a forum on Capitol Hill. This proposal would expand our country’s capacity to harness innovation to create real impact—impact in the form of high-paying jobs.

Academic research has driven many of the most vital technological advancements and industries of the last 50 years. Imagine the world without the benefits of the Internet. Or biotechnology, sparked by Stanford’s invention for recombinant DNA. Or the semiconductor industry, enabled in part by the “Mead and Conway revolution” from Caltech and MIT and the MOSIS IC fabrication platform at the University of Southern California.

Meanwhile, as a Wall Street Journal column highlighted recently, private industry has shied away from basic research since the heyday of companies like Bell Labs. Accordingly, the Obama administration has stepped up its commitment to science and technology.

Without question, investing in pioneering research is more important than ever for our country now, as we work harder to maintain—or even regain—the technological leadership we’ve been losing to other countries.

Yet, according to the Labor Department, over 15 million Americans are out of work and 7.2 million have lost their jobs in the last two years. Ask one of them about funding for basic research and they might say, “Sounds fancy, but unless that test tube is cooking up my next mortgage payment or kid’s college tuition, what’s in it for me?” It can be hard to make the case when world-changing ideas take such a long time to make it to market.

A U.S. Census Bureau report earlier this year demonstrated that new ventures are a critical part of job creation. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke is quite clear on the subject: in the last three decades, he said in a speech recently, startups have accounted for nearly all increased employment in the American private sector. In other words, if you want job growth, create businesses.

Here’s where higher education already has made a real difference. University-launched startups are particularly good powerhouses for value creation; Brent Goldfarb and Magnus Henreksen found in 2003 that at least 8 percent of university spin-offs in the United States become public companies, more than 100 times the average of new companies.

In 2007 alone, more than 550 companies spun out and more than 650 products made it to market from universities nationwide. This means that the next high-growth company is likely to be lurking in a university laboratory near you.

But here’s the catch: University inventions and new technologies face major hurdles on their path from research to market. And for every groundbreaking invention that makes it, dozens of others are left on the shelf, waiting to be put to work.

IMPACT is a pilot initiative that would invest a small amount of federal funding—$2 million per program at 10 local demonstration sites—to identify best practices for coaxing breakthrough ideas out of universities, and to develop objective metrics for measuring results. The ultimate goal is to expand the program to all eligible universities, so Americans everywhere who are eager to work can share in the benefits these new businesses can create.

At the University of Southern California, through the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, we have already seen how a renewed focus on accelerating innovation can impact the economy.
At least 24 USC-bred businesses are in operation. In 2009, just seven of those startups reported a combined revenue exceeding $30 million; we believe the total of all 24 companies to be far greater. Moreover, in the last two years, 16 of the spin-offs raised at least $148 million in financing. And, importantly, these companies employ approximately 500 full-time employees, more than half locally in Los Angeles.

These initiatives work. They have created businesses, revenues and jobs. We hope to see IMPACT, or its key initiatives, in the nation’s fiscal year 2011 budget so we can create a scalable model to turn more ideas into jobs as soon as possible.

The university innovation process is too critical to be left to chance. By harnessing these ideas and resources, we can open the tap for another 50 years of great economic growth in America.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Krisztina “Z” Holly. For more information about the proposal, click here

http://stevens.usc.edu/read_article.php?news_id=566

By Steven Linan

Born decades after the devastating 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and on the other side of the earth, Omid Nohadani is developing mathematical methodology to ensure such a catastrophe never happens again.

A physicist’s son, Nohadani moved from his native Iran to Germany at age 12 and became a groundbreaking physicist himself. He is at the forefront of the relatively new field of robust optimization — a modeling methodology that uses computational tools to address optimization problems in which the data is uncertain.

Earning his Ph.D. in physics at USC College in 2005, Nohadani will take his research to his new post as assistant professor at Purdue University.

For nearly four years, Nohadani has conducted postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School, where he has advanced his work on robust optimization. The field’s real-world applications could prevent bridges from collapsing due to errors that in the case of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington was later referred to as a blind spot.

The calamity occurred four months after construction because engineers failed to take into account the effects of vertical side winds.

“After these side winds, the bridge started to vibrate like the strings of a guitar,” Nohadani said during a telephone interview from Cambridge. “You can’t just blindly design. You have to take errors into account.”

Nohadani said he built a strong research foundation at USC College. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s in psychics with a minor in philosophy at the University of Bonn in Germany, he chose the College because of his interest in theoretical research and the opportunity to work with Stephan Haas, a highly respected physicist in the field.

“For the particular kind of research I wanted to do, USC was the best choice,” he said. “And because of the family atmosphere, I quickly felt at home. It became my scientific home.”

Haas, professor of physics and astronomy, said Nohadani’s success was a result of his former student’s intellectual independence and originality in research.

“We like to prepare our graduate students as much as we can to develop these characteristics,” said Haas, Nohadani’s academic adviser. “In my experience, successfully struggling with hard research problems at the beginning of a career is an excellent way of gaining the resourcefulness and independence that one looks for in a prolific scientist.”

Nohadani said USC was among the first universities to establish a high-performance computing center (HPCC) to solve scientific problems.

“They brought in 20 to 30 computers to create a parallel machine at HPCC, and I was one of the first users on the computational side,” he said. “By the time I graduated, this machine was the second-largest academic computer in the world. I was a graduate student and allowed to be part of all of that.”

While at USC, Nohadani was appointed Graduate Student in Residence by the Office of the Provost. In that post, he served as a resource for all graduate and professional students and as a liaison with USC administration and faculty.

“This opportunity sharpened my leadership skills significantly,” he said.

Nohadani looks forward to continuing other crucial research in nanophotonics and ultrafast optics at Purdue. He also uses robust optimization techniques to improve treatment for cancer patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His treatment plan takes into account all phases of breathing during radiation, in particular for lung cases. Organ motion during breathing can compromise the effects of radiation.

“This is a mathematical model that has very, very wide applications,” he said. “It can be applied to building bridges, to treating cancer, to assessing the stock market. The model is emerging and finding its way into real life.”

He credited USC College for helping him to reach his current success.

“Nowhere else in the world could I as a graduate student have been able to carry on the kind of research I did there,” he said. “The opportunity was unique.”