In our incessant quest to understand, humans — yes, I checked that I am not a robot! — have always used symbols, forms of representation and their manipulation to help extract meaning. The beautiful mathematics of many centuries, built on human ingenuity, have helped us understand fundamental aspects of nature, enhance scientific discovery, improve the human condition and bring increasing prosperity, global progress and self-actualization.

More spectacularly, though, in the very recent past, mathematics have ushered in extraordinary new technological innovation, most of it centered on computing, but with vast impact on everything, everywhere. In a fascinating twist, the mathematics of Newton and Maxwell, and, in the near future, of Schrödinger, have helped create physical devices and technologies that honor and further celebrate their progenitors, provided that they are given enough nourishment in the form of actual data. And such data is harnessed, processed and interrogated for meaning, insight and new advances, by sensors, devices and algorithms also created because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

This autocatalytic process (can’t help my inner chemical engineer), in which the speed of change of innovation is proportional to the state of innovation (dI/dt~kI), is, of course, Moore’s Law, as a simple integration of the corresponding equation will give you an exponential (I~ekt — I hope I have not lost you here). This explains much of recent technological and computing progress.

But if we take this thinking a bit further, and make for a moment the simple modification that the speed of change of innovation is proportional to the square of the state of innovation (dI/dt~kI2), then the resulting solution is a much faster change; in fact a hockey-stick type change, which mathematicians call a singularity (and, which, for nerdy completeness I must show here: I~1/(k(t_c-t))). Futurist Ray Kurzweil has speculated, using different arguments, that approaching such a singularity is actually not far into the future. And, in fact, if one were to plot the number of data currently collected and analyzed from all kinds of digital sensors and devices, the resulting curve is very much that of a hockey stick (the 1/((t_c-t)) behavior shown above). Which brings us to the centrality of computing in today’s world.

Indeed, consider now that when appropriately harnessed, processed and analyzed — for example, through techniques such as data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence — this data will help us solve long-lasting, grand challenge-like problems in health, sustainability or well-being. Or that it will provide new, unexpected insights to solve the complex problems of the social sciences. And, with my additional expectation that we will use the immense power of data processing inherent to these fast-rising new technologies to help usher in new science, based on this data processed (we humans always explored natural intelligence; this time we will explore the artificial). In a way to stand yet again on the shoulders of giants, except that this time, these figurative giants will consist of the seamless intertwining of technology and humanity, in a new, fascinating double helix.

It is with this emerging vision that we created the new USC School of Advanced Computing (SAC), a part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, but a true integral part of the entire university. The reason for this school-within-a-school reflects the fundamental duality of digital with the physical. Indeed, all data science, all ML, all AI, all quantum computing, are based on the fundamental physical processes taking place in devices and technological artifacts. Thus, SAC was created to be the home of not only the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, of Data Sciences, and the Information Technology Program, but also of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (which is connected with invisible chemical bonds to computer science!). But with a drastic departure from academic orthodoxy, SAC will span all disciplines not only within the Viterbi School, but also across the entire university. This involves the creation of Affinity Faculty Groups across USC in areas such as health, sustainability, computational physical sciences, the arts, computational social sciences, and many more, including the study of unintended consequences of computational technologies, which are multiple and powerful.

They say that today all companies are technology companies. I would take one more step and expand it to say that with pervasive computing technologies, all disciplines are technology-enabled disciplines. SAC was created to make this vision a reality.

 

 

Dean Yannis C. Yortsos