USC Viterbi Vision
As a field that is fundamentally about purpose, about enabling change, and about providing human-centric solutions. And as a field that helps address and solve the world’s grand challenges, for the benefit of humanity.
The large-scale objectives of engineering can be categorized into four key areas:
Sustainable Prosperity | Health | Security | Enriching Life
Note that we believe "sustainable prosperity," deriving from the Greek word for sustainability "αειφορια", which translates into "forever green," more aptly describes what we commonly refer to as "sustainability." Together with the other three areas, they form what can be viewed as a Maslow hierarchy for humanity, generalizing the conventional Maslow hierarchy for an individual (that includes psychological needs, safety and security, belonging and love, self-esteem, and self-actualization).
These fields of endeavor provide context for our school in terms of education and research, characterizing its breadth and the enabling nature of all other disciplines. They will remain constant goals for humanity, regardless of the accelerating progress of AI, although they will be significantly influenced and enabled by its accelerating rate.
This analogy, invoked in the articulation of the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges in 2008, remains valid today. What is increasingly different is the accelerating speed of technology. In the past, many technologies have observed Moore’s Law, which can be described by an exponential function. Today’s rate of change is likely faster than exponential, perhaps approaching a singularity, evoking Kurzweil’s 2005 book “The Singularity is Near”. Whether or not we are close to this singularity, the fast and accelerating advances in AI are signaling a “phase transition”. The creation of the new School of Advanced Computing within the Viterbi School of Engineering helps us meet this phase change transition head-on. In doing so, we must continue having a deep technical knowledge of each domain and endeavor, all of which are now interdisciplinary and impactful, and benefit from the extraordinary advances in computing.
We also believe that the objectives of practically all scientific disciplines, not just engineering, can fit into these four areas. Today, we often refer to all corporations as technology corporations. It may not be too long before all disciplines become increasingly technology-driven.
The ever-closer “intertwining of technology with humanity” can be visualized as a sort of double helix, with one strand comprising technology and the other comprising our human interactions. Ultimately, this will raise a fundamental question about how we ensure that this double helix works for the common good.
This interconnection requires that engineers possess in-depth domain knowledge and remain “in the loop”, thereby ensuring trustworthiness. With trust comprising two components, namely competence and character, engineering graduates must not only possess in-depth technical domain knowledge but also be immersed in ethics and human values that will help advance the key challenges in the Maslow hierarchy fields for the collective benefit. This is an important component of all Viterbi education.
We view AI as a tool, as a catalyst, and/or as a technology. Education, learning, and discovery can be viewed through the lens of chemical reactions, in which AI serves as the catalyzing agent that accelerates this reaction and enhances learning. A key objective in Viterbi educational environments is for AI to enhance critical thinking, rather than supplant it, through AI-enhanced teaching and research, enabling faster and more thorough student learning and the acceleration of scientific discovery. To be sure, AI will not obviate the need for educational attainment, as learning and discovery also involve emotional and social interactions, mindsets of growth, curiosity, question asking, and, importantly, the freedom to fail, which are all characteristics of innovation.
We also view AI as a technology. At Viterbi, we consider technology as “leveraging phenomena for useful purposes,” following Brian Arthur’s 2009 definition. Such phenomena can be categorized in order of increasing complexity as physical, chemical, biological, and finally, social and behavioral. A similar definition can be applied to AI as a technology, with the notable exception that in place of phenomena, one must substitute data. Namely, AI, as a technology, is leveraging data for useful purposes. This remarkable new technological ability enables AI to address complexity and convergence across all domains and fields, a feature that is crucial to all our endeavors in the Viterbi School of Engineering. This ability to utilize data of all kinds to predict, interpolate, extrapolate, and move forward can also be accelerated with the addition of deep domain knowledge, which provides physics-, chemistry-, or engineering-domain-informed methods to further focus and constrain the exploration region.
The responsible incorporation of AI into engineering education and practice presents new challenges. We list three main characteristics that engineering graduates will need to accomplish the transition: deep domain knowledge, immersion in AI technologies, and the character to uphold human values. In the age of AI, society will ask engineers to be the bearers of deep knowledge and truth, so that what AI produces is harmless, helpful, and honest. In this respect, engineers will have to act as the agents of trust in the interconnection between humans and AI technology, to be the quintessential human in the loop.
The traditional definition of engineering has been the combination of “energy, materials and information”. AI is, in fact, a combination of all three of these entities, given its voracious energy consumption, the specialized chips required, and the need for training data. At the same time, in our new era, a new human-centric element is added, namely trust. At the Viterbi School, we aim to educate leaders who can balance the gains afforded by new technologies with the vulnerabilities created by their byproducts, without compromising the well-being of society and humanity.
The mechanics of implementing such a vision rest on four key pillars: Talent (faculty, students, and staff), Programs and Infrastructure, Thought Leadership, and Impact. Excellence is contingent upon the collective action of all these interconnected pillars, and the excellence of specific pillars contributes collectively to the overall excellence.
Specifically, at Viterbi, we aim for the following:
- Impact: a. Timely graduation of trustworthy engineers, namely, individuals with outstanding technical competence and with outstanding character. b. Offering outstanding professional engineering education (MS level). c. Graduating outstanding PhD-level engineers to fuel academia and the industry. d. Significantly influencing the scientific and technological direction. Creating IP that can be commercialized and lead to the formation of startups and future industries. f. Helping advance the economy, education (including K-12), and prosperity of Los Angeles, Southern California, the US, and the world at large, directly through current Viterbi initiatives and indirectly through Viterbi alumni.
- Thought Leadership: Providing seminal contributions and ideas to help advance the state of the art in the solution of any of the grand challenges contained in the four fields of endeavor discussed above.
- Programs and Infrastructure: Innovative and constant reimagining of academic curricula, coursework, educational methods, entrepreneurship and innovation, laboratory and experiential learning, research activities, outside-the-curriculum activities, student groups and projects, global immersion, educational and research partnerships with the industry, such as co-op and internships, and society at large. With Infrastructure, we refer to access to modern and updated facilities, laboratories, hands-on experimental resources, computing resources, and specialized facilities relevant to the fields of interest described above.
- Talent: Competitive recruitment, retention, and growth towards increasing and continuing excellence of faculty, students, and staff. Robust academic progress and national and global recognition of faculty and student quality. And by viewing staff as the catalysts of the educational process, expectations regarding quality and resources must also be devoted accordingly.
Our vision dictates the constant identification of opportunities, prioritizes areas for improvement, seeks necessary resources, and develops strategies for continuing and enhanced academic excellence. Fundamental to its success is the continuing cultivation of a culture of excellence, trust, and confidence. Indeed, we aim to provide the blueprint for a future version of the 2004 and 2005 National Academy of Engineering reports, The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century, and Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century, in our new age of AI.
Published on January 23rd, 2026
Last updated on January 23rd, 2026