1. In 1983, USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) researchers Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel pioneered the Domain Name System, which introduced the .com, .edu, .gov and .org internet naming standards. What is the first domain name they created?

   1. com
   2. edu
   3. gov
   4. org

2. That same year, Fred Cohen demonstrated a self-replicating source code, which his USC advisor, Professor Leonard Adleman, coined as a:

   1. “Decepticon”
   2. “Virus”
   3. “Walter Mondale”
   4. “A Self-Replicating Source Code”

3. The USC Interaction Lab pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics in 2005. These robots assist people with:

   1. Stand-up comedy
   2. Selecting the optimal angle for selfies
   3. The Cha-Cha Slide Challenge on TikTok
   4. Rehab, autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety and healthy aging

4. The coldest spot on Earth might be:

   1. The USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center in Marina del Rey, Calif. (home of the first operational quantum computing center in academia). The D-Wave’s processor temperature is a brisk minus 459.53 degrees F.
   2. East Antarctica Plateau, Antarctica
   3. Denali, Alaska
   4. Häagen-Dazs headquarters, Minneapolis

5. In a seminal paper, alumni Ashish Vaswani, (Ph.D. ’14) and Niki Parmar (M.S. ’15), laid the foundation for ChatGPT and other generative AI systems, introducing the transformer architecture. That 2017 paper was titled:

   1. “Attention Is All You Need”
   2. “Transformers: More Than Meets the Eyes”
   3. “The Rise and Fall of Recurrent or Convolutional Neural Networks”
   4. “How to Explain the Peloponnesian War in 30 Seconds or Less”

6. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) pioneered many of the virtual humans and characters seen in movies. Which film did not use USC technology?

   1. “Avatar”
   2. “Furious 7”
   3. “Spider-Man 2”
   4. “Sharknado”

7. Multicast transmission over the internet, or Mbone, was co-created by USC ISI’s Stephen Casner in 1992. Two years later, in 1994, Mbone was used to transmit the first major live concert over the internet, featuring:

   1. Pink Floyd
   2. The Spice Girls
   3. The Rolling Stones
   4. Dre

8. In 1965, Professor Richard Bellman joined the faculty. He is best known as the father of:

   1. Computer vision
   2. Database systems
   3. Computational biology
   4. Dynamic programming

9. In 2023, USC President Carol Folt launched the $1 billion-plus USC Frontiers of Computing, which includes:

   1. The new USC School of Advanced Computing
   2. The Silicon Beach Campus in West L.A.
   3. Hiring 60 new interdisciplinary computing faculty
   4. All of the above

10. You can thank USC for today’s selfies and the majority of digital images we share daily. The USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) is where coding research began in digital image compression standards we know today as:

    1. TIFF
    2. JPEG and MPEG
    3. PDF
    4. EPS

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