USC innovators now have a new home in Boston: The USC Information Sciences Institute chose the startup hotspot as the site for its third office. The big expansion is just the latest sign of USC’s growth and influence in the tech world, though. USC engineers and their computing innovations have been changing high tech for decades.
Chances are you’re probably benefiting from advances and inventions created by alumni and faculty, without even knowing it. Here are three ways Trojan techies changed the field.
USC engineering grad student Fred Cohen first defined the oncoming threats from computer viruses in 1983. He is credited with inventing the major virus defense techniques in use today.
Researchers at USC’s Signal and Imaging Processing Institute came up with a way to digitize and compress images in the mid-1970s. Today called .jpg, it has made the selfie ubiquitous.
Internet Domain Name System
You take .com, .edu, .net and the other internet suffixes for granted. But it was Paul Mockapetris at the USC Information Sciences Institute who invented the Domain Name System, or DNS, in 1983.