USC’s Department of Computer Science Opens its Doors to Prospective Doctoral Students

On March 1, 2018, 50 prospective PhD students from across the United States and beyond experienced a slice of life at USC during the Department of Computer Science annual PhD Visit Day. Following a welcome and overview from department chair Cyrus Shahabi and PhD program associate department chair Laurent Itti, the visiting students met with faculty members, toured the department’s labs and connected with current students.

The day’s events culminated with a PhD poster session in the evening, featuring 54 research projects from current graduate students and faculty ranging from mathematical modeling and simulations to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. The poster session allowed current students and faculty to share their research with potential students and discuss funding options and other possibilities available for students in the graduate program.

The PhD poster session winners were:

• Michael Tsang, Dehua Cheng, Yan Liu: Detecting Statistical Interactions from Neural Network Weights
• Aaron Schlenker: Game Theoretic Threat Screening and Deception for Cyber Security
• Karol Hausman, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Ziyu Wang, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller: Learning Robot Skill Embeddings
• Shuyang Gao, Kyle Reing, Aram Galstyan:  Sifting Common Information from Many Variables

The following day, the visiting students explored LA’s Silicon Beach tech hub, home to USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute and the Institute for Creative Technologies. “Visit Day provides a wonderful opportunity for our current students to share their research and to help our prospective students get a feel for what the program is all about,” said Lizsl De Leon, director of student affairs for the Department of Computer Science.

View photos from the event below or click here for the full collection. Photos by Angela Inostroza-Hoffman.

Published on April 18th, 2018

Last updated on May 16th, 2024