Botball is an educational program that strives to engage students in team-oriented robotics competition.

Over two months of intensive training, the students went from being vaguely interested in robots and the math and science behind them to developing a keen interest in robotics and other science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related subjects.

On that Saturday, their team would finish fourth out of 48 teams. Though the team didn’t take home the grand prize, members may have learned something more important, according to mentors Jason Craig and Deyon Shearer.

“Going through this process brings more meaning to the math and science they’re taking in school,” said Craig, a STEM teacher at Upland Junior High. “They can see an outcome. There’s a reason to learn it.”

The high school competed in the largest regional botball tournament in the world, which was organized by Ross Mead, a USC Viterbi PhD candidate in computer science. Two months earlier, Mead introduced students to the computer programming material at a two-day training session at USC. During the session, the 10-student Upland High team worked with their mentors to learn robot design and computer programming.

In the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall, Upland students prepared their robot for the first round of competition. The team’s robot earned the seventh-highest number of points in that round by completing obstacle course tasks, such as capturing objects or knocking them down.

Upland advanced to the double elimination round in which its robot won five head-to-head competitions by autonomously navigating the course more efficiently than competitors.

A National Science Foundation grant funded Upland and 27 other botball teams to study different mentorship styles and their impact on student self-confidence in STEM.

Mead hopes the grant received by USC will help educators understand the most effective ways to foster a deeper appreciation of STEM and increase student self-confidence. The nation’s economic future and continued ability to innovate are at stake, some experts believe.

According to those experts, the United States suffers from a lack of young students who are excited about entering STEM fields. Only 4.5 percent of American students receive university degrees in engineering, compared to 14 percent in Europe and 21 percent in Asia, according to a recent Forbes editorial by Andrew Viterbi PhD ’62, namesake of USC Viterbi.

Student belief in their scientific abilities is a solid indicator of whether they will enter into STEM-related fields. It is an even more accurate predictor than past achievement, according to experts.

“It’s about inspiring kids to do something that they frankly think they are incapable of doing,” Mead said.

Mead understands the importance of a strong mentor as well as anyone. In a small high school in Illinois, Mead excelled in math and science, yet he didn’t see these skills leading to a desirable career path. A professor at a nearby university encouraged him to start a robotics team at his school to compete in botball.

Under Mead’s direction, the team won the competition two years in a row, beating dozens of high school and college teams. Thirteen years later, Mead still maintains his relationship, both personal and professional, with his former mentor, Jerry Weinberg of Southern University Illinois-Edwardsville.

Mead credits the encouragement he received from his mentor for his engineering success. He wants other young students to benefit from similar relationships.

Maja Matarić, Mead’s PhD adviser and renowned robotics expert at USC Viterbi, shares Mead’s belief in the power of encouraging students to enter STEM-related fields.

“Role modeling, mentoring and championing are critical for recruiting and retaining students in fields that are not typical, popularized or stereotyped career choices,” Matarić said.

Upland students already feel more confident in their abilities. When they began building their robot, they only wanted to score in the competition. When they saw their robot performing well in the recent competition, they said they hoped to place first, second or third.

Though they fell just short of their goal, they said they were proud of their performance and looked forward to coming back next year.

“To watch the robot our team created run and work, it felt awesome,” said 12-year-old student Saqlian Naqvi.

Natarajan, who holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Tufts University, currently serves as executive vice president of Raytheon BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass. He will begin his new position on July 1.

“The Information Sciences Institute is the jewel of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of USC Viterbi. “Under the leadership of two visionary leaders — Keith Uncapher and Herb Schorr — it has grown into a powerhouse of scientific and technological research in the general area of information sciences. In the person of Dr. Natarajan, we look for the continuation and growth of the Uncapher and Schorr legacies and the development of a truly exciting new vision for the institute.”

During his 17 years with BBN, Natarajan rose through the technical, managerial and leadership ranks. He started as a member of the research staff at BBN, dedicating his first years to conducting government funded research in optical character recognition, speech recognition, video text recognition and topic classification.

In 2001, Natarajan was promoted to manager of speech engineering and senior scientist, and in 2004 he was named deputy manager of the speech and language processing department and lead scientist. In the latter role, he led the development of technical strategy, identifying new research areas and galvanizing the team behind a compelling vision.

In subsequent years, Natarajan was promoted to vice president, principal scientist and executive vice president – one of three at BBN. He holds several patents, including one for a method and apparatus for training an automated speech recognition-based system.

At ISI, Natarajan will succeed USC Viterbi Executive Vice Dean John O’Brien, who has served as acting director since September 2012. O’Brien will remain available to help Natarajan as needed in his new role.

“For more than 40 years, researchers at ISI have helped shape the future in computer science and information technology, spanning such diverse fields as computer networks, robotics, health informatics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, electronics and machine translation, to name just a few. It is a privilege to be afforded the opportunity to serve as the leader of this pioneering research institute and to succeed its visionary leaders Keith Uncapher and Herb Schorr,” Natarajan said. “I look forward to working closely with every single member of ISI faculty, staff and students, and with the [University Park Campus] faculty in advancing the mission of ISI, the Viterbi School and USC, and shaping an exciting new vision for the institute.”

ISI is one of the nation’s largest and most successful university-affiliated computer research institutes, attracting nearly $60 million from corporations and government agencies for basic and applied research.

At its Marina del Rey, Calif., and Arlington, Va., campuses, more than 350 engineers, research scientists, graduate students and staff explore research frontiers in intelligent systems, informatics, computational systems and advanced electronics.

ISI was on the ground floor of helping to conceive and create the Internet, developing communications protocols that remain in use today.

“The enabling power of engineering is transforming the world in unprecedented ways and with exponential speed,” Yortsos said. “We are committed for ISI to continue being the nerve-center of this evolution, to shape the important questions facing us and to solve the grand challenges of our times, utilizing the power of computer science and information technology.”

The son of a construction worker, Araujo is today a first-generation college student at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences — with hopes to continue his studies after graduation.

Araujo had been attending Cerritos Community College (CCC) in Norwalk, Calif., when he heard about USC Dornsife’s paid Summer Research Internship in Solar Energy program. He had always loved science and decided to apply. After participating in the eight-week program, the brainchild of USC Dornsife chemistry professors Richard Brutchey, Stephen Bradforth and Mark Thompson, Araujo found that his academic ambitions and life goals had been transformed.

“I got hands-on experience that helped reinforce my interest in chemistry and made me begin to understand the value of being able to do undergraduate research at school,” Araujo said. “The program definitely motivated me to apply to four-year universities, especially research universities. I also know now that I want to go to graduate school.”

The community college transfer student is majoring in chemistry — as he holds down a job in the chemistry labs — and is planning to pursue a graduate degree and a career in science. None of this would have happened, Araujo said, had it not been for the summer internship and the resulting support and mentorship he received from Brutchey and his team.

“My family wasn’t against higher education, but they just didn’t know how to be supportive of me being a college student,” he said. “They weren’t able to offer me advice on universities or transferring or any of that either.

“To be honest, I would never even have applied to USC if I hadn’t participated in the program,” Araujo continued. “I always thought going to USC was something unreachable because it’s a private university and I thought it would be too expensive. Even after I was accepted, I wasn’t going to come because I didn’t think there was any way I was going to be able to afford it.”

Thanks to Brutchey’s encouragement, Araujo applied for and received a generous financial aid package.

“He took some convincing,” Brutchey said. “I told him it can’t hurt to try. He did and it worked out. He’s doing really well in his classes, he has been working in my lab, and he’s doing a work/study program and managing to do it all successfully.”

Founded three years ago by Brutchey, Bradforth and Thompson, the Summer Research Internship in Solar Energy program is designed to help minority students in the community college system — a group that studies show is at particularly high risk of dropping out without completing a degree.

According to the Los Angeles Community College District, there are roughly 250,000 community college students in the greater Los Angeles area — one of the highest concentrations in the country.

Many students in California’s vast community college system, particularly minorities, struggle to graduate or transfer to four-year universities. According to a recent study of California’s community colleges, 80 percent of Latino and 75 percent of African-American students have not completed a community college degree or certificate after six years.

“These statistics made us think about what a tier-one research university like USC could do to help,” Brutchey said. “We noticed that while there were many outreach programs in chemical sciences for K-12 students, there was a lack of outreach activity directed toward community college students for physical sciences, and specifically for the chemical sciences.”

Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), the program is aimed at recruiting community college students to study fields in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“We thought that offering students in this situation an internship in science or engineering might motivate them to continue their studies,” Brutchey said.

Their intuition proved correct. Of the seven students who have participated in the program, two are continuing their studies at community college and five have transferred to four-year universities to major in STEM disciplines. One of those students is going on to pharmacy school.

Another, Joseph Mastron, who transferred to USC Dornsife two years ago, will graduate this spring and will enter a PhD program in physical chemistry in the fall. He plans to continue his research into photovoltaics, a subject he discovered during his internship. (“Photovoltaic” refers to the direct conversion of light into electricity.)

“The program was a life-changing event for me,” Mastron said. “In fact, it was the best event of my life.”

What he learned in the laboratory was invaluable, he said, and “shaped who I am today.”

And that’s the goal, Brutchey said — to foster an interest in science and related careers by providing valuable hands-on research training and intensive mentoring.

Brutchey is sympathetic to what he believes are the underlying reasons why so many community college students are struggling to remain in higher education.

“Many of these students are in really difficult positions: They have to work, many of them have families, they have real lives on top of trying to attend school, so that’s probably why so many of them struggle. It’s a lot to handle,” he said. “So the first thing we decided was to make this a paid internship with the hope that the stipend we offer encourages them to do this, rather than take a side job for the summer.”

The outreach program currently focuses on CCC. Located in southeast LA County, the college reportedly has the sixth largest population of Latino community college students in the nation. There, Brutchey and his colleagues work closely with chemistry Professor Jeff Bradbury, who helps select the students for the program. To be eligible, students must be majoring in a scientific discipline and have completed a first-year chemistry course. Minorities and women, generally underrepresented in the physical sciences, are especially encouraged to apply.

The USC Dornsife professors chose solar cell research as the focus of the research internship.

“There is a core group of faculty within the chemistry department who work in this area and we thought it was an attractive topic for these students because it’s familiar to them,” Brutchey said.

By focusing on solar cell research, students also learn a great deal about nanoscience — a hot topic across a broad spectrum of cutting-edge chemistry and physics.

Program participants work with USC researchers to design and synthesize new molecules and materials for use in “organic” — basically plastic and therefore relatively affordable — photovoltaic technology. Through the program, students develop a first-hand understanding of the physical processes of energy capture, efficient energy conversion from sunlight to electricity and electrical charge collection.

The internship also touches on topics such as scientific ethics, implementing the scientific method in the research laboratory, and career opportunities for scientists and engineers.

Brutchey and his colleagues certainly had no problem getting students interested in the program.

“Every year we go to CCC and give a general seminar on the world energy crisis, how alternative energy can help alleviate some of these problems and how solar cells can be part of the solution,” Brutchey said. “We hold it during the lunch break and it’s open to all students. We’ve had great success attracting students to this lecture with upwards of a couple of hundred students showing up just out of general interest.”

Upon the students’ arrival at USC, Brutchey lets them know the expectation level.

“Working in academia, working in a research lab is certainly different than working at a convenience store but we expect them to treat this as a job,” Brutchey said. “They have a research supervisor. We expect them to keep regular hours and put in 40 hours a week. And at the end we ask them to give a 15-minute research presentation of their data in front of their mentors and USC Dornsife and CCC faculty.

“All the students are able to meet these expectations and surpass them in many cases.”

Several former interns have published peer review papers and presented their work at national meetings of the American Chemical Society. Every student who has completed their units at CCC has transferred to a four-year university and all have majored in a STEM discipline.

James Gentile, former president and CEO of RCSA, underscored the importance of these outreach efforts.

“American demographics are changing, and meanwhile many other nations are going to great lengths to improve their science education as well as their basic research programs,” Gentile said. “If America hopes to remain first among equals in science and technology throughout the coming century, we must encourage more women and minorities to become scientists. Developing superb science education opportunities such as the one at USC is a cornerstone of that effort.”

Encouraging undergraduate students to work with scientists, such as Brutchey, Bradforth and Thompson, is the best way to create the next generation of American scientists, Gentile added.

“It is critically important, both for the state and for the national economy, to do whatever we can to get students interested in science, math and engineering,” Brutchey said. “At some small level I think we are accomplishing that in this program.”

Medical researchers have long used mice and rats to help formulate new drugs and vaccines, in part because their genetic and biological characteristics closely parallel human physiology. But many experimental drugs that work extraordinarily well in rodents fail miserably when tested in people.

One such drug, α-galactosylceramide (α-GalCer), essentially wipes out cancerous tumors in mice by activating the body’s immune system; for reasons not entirely clear, the drug does not trigger the same response in people with cancer. Scientists hypothesize that this failure is due to subtle differences between the CD1d molecules in mice and humans and how they respond to tumors and infection. CD1d molecules are found on certain cells that trigger the body’s innate immune response.

In a study to be published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USC researchers describe how they genetically engineered mice to express CD1d molecules that look more like those in humans and in more similar proportions. More importantly, the humanized CD1d molecules effectively trigger natural killer T (NKT) cells — a recently discovered type of white blood cell that attacks tumors and infection — in live animals when exposed to α-GalCer.

“It’s the best model we have in the field,” said Weiming Yuan, assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and principal investigator of the study. “We’ve basically set a platform to fast-track the identification of immunotherapies that can kill cancer and also make vaccines stronger.”

Once activated, NKT cells react in a matter of hours whereas other T cells may take days. This rapid response makes them difficult to study but also an ideal target for drug-makers. Yuan’s humanized mouse allows scientists to more accurately test the viability of those NKT cell-targeting drugs before going to human clinical trials.

“Before, it would have been a guess as to whether the drug would work in people. Now, the chance of success goes from one out of 100 to one out of five,” Yuan said.

Yuan and colleagues have yet to demonstrate the effects of inserting a more human-like version of the final component of the CD1d/NKT system, the T cell receptor. More experiments are necessary to determine why α-GalCer is ineffective in treating people with cancer and to develop novel α-GalCer derivatives that work with the human immune system.

Co-authors included Xiangshu Wen, Seil Kim and Agnieszka Lawrenczyk of the Keck School; Ping Rao of the UCLA Immunogenetics Center and Department of Pathology; Leandro Carreño and Steven Porcelli of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University; and Peter Cresswell of the Yale University School of Medicine.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 AI091987, R01 AI059167, R01 AI045889), the Harry Lloyd Charitable Trust, the Margaret Early Medical Research Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The daylong series of presentations and demonstrations from USC leaders in digital technology featured timely research from across the university, much of it never presented to a general audience. The showcase attracted wide interest from local, national and international media, including the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Voice of America, among many others.

The event also exemplified the university’s might in cross-disciplinary research, as Vice President of Research Randolph Hall had noted before the event: “USC’s strength in digital technology includes the collaboration between the arts and engineering, and technology and storytelling, that makes possible a conversation with the avatar of a real witness to history, the recreation of digital actors indistinguishable from their human counterparts and the development of interactive adventures whose impact on behavior earns them the title of serious games.” (Hall’s opening remarks at the showcase follow below.)

In the first presentation of the showcase, which was hosted by the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA), Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, demonstrated “New Dimensions in Testimony,” a collaborative project with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), to capture stories from Holocaust survivors by combining new interview content with advanced filming, voice-recognition processing and display technologies that will allow students to engage in dialogue with virtual survivors for years to come.

Paul Debevec, associate director for graphics research at ICT and winner of a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for his work in rendering digital faces, presented his work on ICT’s latest innovations, including the Light Stage capture system, which uses specialized algorithms to digitally reproduce an actor’s appearance and movements. Debevec also showed early stage work on holographic video conferencing.

Cyrus Shahabi of the Integrated Media Systems Center at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering described the growing field of geo-crowdsourcing, including an invention close to market that beats Google and Yahoo directions in giving drivers the fastest possible route through traffic in real time.

Researchers from SCA presented work on serious games from the Game Innovation Lab, showing how such games are changing human behavior. The Game Innovation Lab falls under the umbrella of USC Games, ranked by the Princeton Review and GamePro Media as the No. 1 game design program in North America in 2012.

Jonathan Taplin of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism discussed Sentimeter, a Twitter sentiment analysis project that allows computers to read and interpret huge chunks of data from Twitter in real time. This approach promises to provide more accurate measurement of television ratings, as well as other metrics important to marketers and advertisers.

Introduced as a closing presenter by SCA Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, noted production designer and new faculty member Alex McDowell described his world-building innovation in pioneering films, such as Minority Report and the upcoming Upside Down, and explained how this approach can drive narrative and invention in film and other industries. McDowell is establishing a media lab at SCA to apply his method widely and already has funding from Intel and other corporate clients.

The day also included live demonstrations of technologies discussed during the event, as well as additional projects under development at USC.

In his welcoming remarks, Hall reminded the audience of the university’s long history as a leader in digital technology.

“We are a university with 38,000 students, including more international students than any other university in America, and, with 21,000 students, one of the nation’s largest graduate programs,” he said. “We are the private largest employer in LA, with a presence that includes our Health Sciences Campus, the Information Sciences Institute, ICT and the Wrigley Institute, all in addition to our University Park Campus, where you are today.

“Digital media and technology is something special for USC,” Hall continued. “Our president, Max Nikias, established the Integrated Media Systems Center at USC in the 1990s because he saw how computer graphics, video imagery and sound would affect how we are entertained, how we learn and how we conduct business. Today no university matches USC’s range of talent in creating the technology and content surrounding digital media, as well as studying how these influence society.”

According to Hall, GLIMPSE will demonstrate USC’s leadership in building the digital future, where innovation arises from the:

• largest computer science research program among all universities in the United States. This is where the Internet domain system was created, and where USC is developing real-time computer graphics, virtual humans, immersion and language translation technology.

• School of Cinematic Arts, where the THX sound system was developed and USC is creating interactive media, scientific animations and computer generated imagery

• USC Annenberg School of Communication, which studies how people are using social media, gaming and other digitized content in work, entertainment, politics and business.

“But digital media pervades this entire university, utilized in health communication, scientific simulation and K-12 education,” Hall explained. “And it is also changing how we conduct research, as reflected in our Creativity and Collaboration in the Academy initiative, our Digital USC website, and our changing policies to enable and reward digital scholarship.”

For more information on USC’s digital presence and initiatives, visit research.usc.edu

An expert in video games who writes for important niche industry outlets, such as Kotaku, VG247 and Appolicious, Owen admitted that many of the innovations he saw were beyond his experiences.

“This is really intriguing,” said Owen, after putting on a helmet and suiting up for Project Holodeck, an immersive 3-D platform from the USC Games program, a joint effort between the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “It is completely immersive. The action is in your face no matter where you look. I felt like I had to relearn how to play.”

Project Holodeck was just one of the many hands-on tools of the future ready for prime time at the technology demo showcasing projects that cut across academic disciplines.

“We are moving to a point where art, science, design and engineering are inseparable,” said Alex McDowell, SCA visiting professor who incorporated urban planning and storytelling to create the realistic future world of Minority Report.

During his presentation, McDowell recalled that the director of the film, Steven Spielberg, told him that they were not making science fiction but making the future reality.

That could be said of many of the prototypes on display at the GLIMPSE showcase — from the inexpensive Socket Mobile glasses, which turn any tablet or phone into an immersive viewer, to the hologram of a Holocaust survivor who could answer questions from the audience.

The glasses, which are made using a 3-D printer, were created by the folks at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The same institute also teamed up with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education to turn the memories of an 85-year-old man into history lessons for future generations.

The examples of collaborative efforts were not lost on the students.

Prashant Bhalchandra, a master’s student in computer science at USC Viterbi, teamed up with Emory Irpan, a senior in business administration at the USC Marshall School of Business, and a handful of other students to create the PC-based video game Core Overload. The space shootout game offers heavy customization, allowing players to choose the wings, engines and miscellaneous assets of their spaceships.

“We brought together people with different backgrounds — musicians, sound engineers, set designers, artists, management, producers and engineers,” said Bhalchandra.

“At the beginning of the process, we were creating the game to build our résumé and get skills,” Irpan added. “Now companies are coming to us and are interested in purchasing the concept.”

But for a presentation on his work at “GLIMPSE: A Digital Technology Showcase,” an exhibition of USC’s digital media prowess, Debevec showed off a lower-key demonstration that was just as impressive. He played video of an actress displaying a range of different facial expressions and moods. No explosions, no fantasy creatures — just video of an entirely digital creation, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Debevec, associate director of graphics research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, has been making his mark in the field of digital animation since the 1990s. And chances are you’ve seen some of his work.

In 1997, the computer scientist directed a short film allowing viewers to fly over a photo-realistic version of the Campanile at the University of California, Berkeley. This virtual cinematography caught the eye of John Gaeta, visual effects supervisor for The Matrix and ultimately helped develop the movie’s iconic “bullet-time” sequences.

What he’s best known for, however, is his work with digital capture technology systems known as Light Stages. Appropriately, these stages look the part for a technology that helps Hollywood create blockbuster moments.

Picture a geodesic sphere filled with lighted bulbs. Actors climb inside and are photographed from 360 degrees, capturing a wide range of expressions and movements. The vast array of data these stages can capture provides “an alphabet of anything [the actor’s] face can do,” Debevec said.

They can capture and modify different layers as well — including the specular reflection created from light bouncing off the sheen of oils on an actor’s face. Controlling these reflections are a crucial part of making digital animation convincing, and the Light Stage animations have the distinction of crossing the uncanny valley, the point at which the human eye can tell a recreated human being from the real thing. Debevec said when he first showed the actress in the demonstration her digital self, it was convincing enough to fool her.

As digital effects have become more widely used in film, this kind of technology has found new applications. There are obvious ways to use it, such as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Brad Pitt’s face is artificially aged using effects that earned the film an Academy Award. But there are more subtle ways as well.

The blue-faced Na’vi are the standout animations in Avatar. But considering that many of the environments are digitally rendered, Debevec said, it makes more sense for many scenes to use digital recreations of the human actors rather than filming and inserting them separately. Few, if any, viewers could tell if lead actor Sam Worthington is real or not when he’s lying on the jungle floor or when Stephen Lang’s villainous character is encased in a robotic mech.

Even less fanciful Hollywood fare has made use of this technique. In The Social Network, the Winklevoss twins were played by actor Armie Hammer and a stand-in, Josh Pence. Hammer’s face was digitally inserted over Pence’s — though watching a scene where “the twins” speak to each other in close-up while rowing a boat, you certainly wouldn’t know it.

These may be the most obvious uses of Light Stage technology, but Debevec has just started to scratch the surface. Partnering with the USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, Debevec and his colleagues are capturing full-body data of Holocaust survivors. These time-intensive shoots are conducted as lengthy interviews — survivors are asked about their experiences, their thoughts on the existence of God and other questions in several different ways. The idea is that schoolchildren will be able to view and even interact with holographic versions of the survivors, preserving their memories and experiences for future generations.

“We want to give as much as we possibly can to give these kids a sense of who these people were,” Debevec said.

During his GLIMPSE presentation, Paul Debevec played video of an entirely digital creation, indistinguishable from the real thing. (Photo/Andrew Good)

Holograms are another research interest for Debevec. Along with virtual reality expert Mark Bolas, associate director of the Institute for Creative Technologies, he’s experimenting with holographic teleconferencing. During the GLIMPSE presentation, he played a video showing researchers speaking to a lifelike head and face created by dozens of handheld pico projectors. Walk around the hologram and you can see the person’s head from 180 degrees.

Debevec has spent much of his career making digital fantasy come to life on movie screens. But with the trajectory of his latest work, it seems yesterday’s blockbuster technology is set to become an everyday feature of tomorrow.

“The screenwriter and I started work on the same day,” said McDowell, a visiting professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) who is widely recognized as one of the most innovative designers working in narrative media.

He described how he thought of the ways people lived, got to work and communicated, creating spaces and products that influenced the script. Spielberg, he said, “didn’t want to create science fiction. He wanted to make future reality.”

On Jan. 29, McDowell showcased his work at “Glimpse: A Digital Technology Showcase,” a daylong presentation for technology journalists that featured projects from several of USC’s tech-focused entities, including SCA’s Game Innovation Lab, the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

McDowell’s production design work on world-building — creating the worlds depicted in fictional narrative — has made him a go-to production designer for directors, such as Spielberg (The Terminal, Minority Report), Tim Burton (Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and David Fincher (Fight Club).

McDowell — who serves as creative director of 5D Institute, a research unit within SCA that operates as a nonprofit collaborative for professionals with interests in promoting world-building — also shared scenes from his work on Upside Down, a 2012 French-Canadian romantic fantasy film about two planets with opposite gravities in which the world building had to be both distinct and parallel.

He also talked about a creature-building project centered around Scott Westerfeld’s young adult novel Leviathan, which he’s working on with second-year SCA students. McDowell showed the audience renderings he and his students made of the “Leviathan” of the story, a whale-like airship that transports the protagonists across worlds. The novel has a steampunk aesthetic and McDowell said it was interesting to work to create imagery that both complemented and opposed the style.

SCA Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, who introduced McDowell to the group, singled him out among a group of faculty who she said are really thinking about and “articulating how we are all going to live between virtual and physical worlds.”

McDowell first came to SCA in 2009 to teach a class titled “Immersive Moviemaking: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design” with John Underkoffler. That class, he said, made him realize that USC was a good fit for the research he was trying to do.

Last fall he taught an interactive media seminar with Associate Dean of Research Scott Fisher. McDowell is currently teaching a class titled “Imagining Worlds: Narrative Design Across Disciplines.”

McDowell’s latest film project is the Superman blockbuster Man of Steel, which will be released this summer.

Now, as part of the “New Dimensions in Testimony” project, Gutter is the first Holocaust survivor to be recorded in 3-D using the “light stage” at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The initiative aims to preserve the valuable experience of engagement and interaction, allowing people to ask questions and have a dialogue with photo-real, three-dimensional survivors of the Holocaust even when they are not able to be physically present.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, presented the prototype of virtual Pinchas Gutter to a packed room of reporters as the kick-off presentation to “GLIMPSE: A Digital Technology Showcase” at USC on Jan. 29.

As the wall-sized Gutter sat back in his armchair, now backed by an image of a library of books, Smith began the conversation: “Hello, Pinchas. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The virtual Gutter leaned forward and responded, in a rich voice that still bore traces of Poland: “You may ask me anything you like.”

After a few general questions, Smith then turned to the audience. While the “New Dimensions” prototype of Gutter is still in early stages, the conversation is directed by the interests of the person engaging with the virtual human. Using natural language technology, Gutter is able to respond to conversational variations in how questions are asked, with relevant responses.

To the audience at the USC event, Smith presented three possible areas for further conversation with Gutter — separation from parents, resistance to the Nazis and God. Members of the project will again interview survivors who are already in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and use a new set of questions, mirroring issues that are often raised in real-life classroom conversations.

At the event, when the audience member chose to learn more about Gutter’s separation from his parents, Smith asked Gutter if he had a chance to say goodbye.

Gutter began to tell his story, about the chaos during the deportation from the Warsaw ghetto to Majdanek, undressing in a crowded room and about the last time he saw his father, walking in front of him with his hands above his head. The virtual Gutter raised his hands above his head to show the motion.

Gutter’s entire family was murdered the day they arrived at the camp. He remembered seeing his twin sister’s braid as she turned the corner in front of him to enter the showers. This, Smith said, highlighted an important part of the project’s ongoing work to make sure that if follow-up questions focused on a specific detail that they would also elicit relevant responses.

Smith then invited the audience to interact with the virtual Pinchas Gutter during the afternoon demonstration session and to have their own dialogue with Gutter, keeping the memory of the golden braid — and the lesson it carries — alive far into the future.

But the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) is leading the way in efforts to elevate video game design to a high art.

The school has helped develop a number of “indie games” that have found viral success on the Internet, have been commercialized as best-selling games and have brought light to serious social issues, including the genocide in Darfur.

Richard Lemarchand, an associate professor who helped develop Sony’s Uncharted video game series, presented some of the school’s most influential “indie game” work on Jan. 29 at “GLIMPSE: A Digital Showcase,” a daylong USC event that presented timely technologies across the university.

One of the games was flOw, which originated as a USC master’s thesis project and eventually was developed into a best-selling game for Sony PlayStation.

A pioneering effort in the field of “serious games” is Darfur Is Dying, which has signed up more than 2 million online players and seeks to spread awareness about the crisis in Sudan.

Walden, which was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, uses 3-D to simulate philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s “experiment in living” at Walden Pond.

Peter Brinson, assistant professor of the practice of cinematic arts, demonstrated The Cat and the Coup, a “documentary game” about the CIA-engineered coup against Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953. The user plays his feline.

“There have been a lot of projects made about war,” Brinson said, who noted that his game explores the more subtle and increasingly important arena of intelligence operations.

The game’s visual artwork is comprised of coded narratives, with information culled from leaked CIA documents and articles from The New York Times.

“The power you have is subtle compared to most [games],” Brinson said.

The Game Innovation Lab, in conjunction with the USC Rossier School of Education, also recently released the first in a series of Facebook games aimed at teaching students how to navigate the oft-complicated process of applying to college and finding financial aid.

The Collegeology Games project is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, among others.

And the SCA alternate reality game Reality Ends Here, which was a hit with freshmen as part of the school’s student orientation process, has shown potential for wider application in business settings and on other campuses.

“The Game Innovation Lab doesn’t exist in an ivory tower,” Lemarchand said.

The Game Innovation Lab is part of USC Games, ranked by the Princeton Review and GamePro Media as the No. 1 game design program in North America last year.