USC Viterbi has long partnered with the world’s most dynamic companies — sharing talent and ideas. The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), for all its head-spinning innovations, has brought many concerns, among them sustainability, privacy and morality. What better way to examine these issues than for USC faculty members to get together with tech leaders? Academia meets industry to tackle problems head-on. Here are a few of the corporate-sponsored AI centers that have been created in recent years at USC Viterbi:

 

USC-Amazon Center on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning

Founded: 2021

Director: Salman Avestimehr, Dean’s Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science

Mission: Fundamental research on privacy, security and trustworthiness in machine learning, a crucial effort, given the proliferation of artificial intelligence across all aspects of our society.

Research: The center has several research projects going that focus on “federated learning,” a method for training AI models that avoids using the personal health information of patients.

 

USC Center for Autonomy and AI (sponsored by Siemens and Toyota)

Founded: 2021

Co-Directors: Rahul Jain, professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and industrial and systems engineering; Jyo Deshmukh, associate professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering

Mission: To lay the foundations for intelligent autonomy in close collaboration with industrial research partners.

Research: Jain and Deshmukh are working on improving the learning methods of autonomous vehicles to prevent “corner cases,” situations the cars have not been trained to navigate.

 

Research and Education in AI and Learning (REAL) @ USC-Meta Center

Founded: 2022

Director: Murali Annavaram, the Lloyd F. Hunt Chair of Electrical Power Engineering and professor of electrical and computing engineering and computer science

Associate Director: Meisam Razaviyayn, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair, associate professor of industrial & systems engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science

Mission: To advance foundations for cooperative algorithmic optimization, hardware innovations for AI, and advance AI education accessibility.

Research: Annavaram spent a year at Meta as a visiting researcher, and he brought what he learned back to USC. He’s trying to find ways to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of large-scale AI systems.

 

USC-Capital One Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance

Founded: 2024

Director: Petros Ioannou, the A.V. “Bal” Balakrishnan Chair, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and Industrial and Systems Engineering

Mission: Home to some of the world’s leading minds in advanced computing, the center will explore how emerging technologies in AI and analytics can be applied to financial systems and services at scale, advancing cross-disciplinary knowledge between finance and technology.

Research: The first center launched under the new School of Advanced Computing will take advantage of USC’s expertise in financial engineering to support research into AI, with the goal of solving some of the most challenging problems in financial services.