Bozhou Zhuang

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Third year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Bora Gencturk

3MT Presentation: Ensuring a Safer World with Nuclear Energy

Abstract: The B Reactor was the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor and it opened the door for nuclear energy. Currently, there are about 440 commercial nuclear power plants in the world to provide 10% of the world’s electricity. The safe operation of nuclear infrastructure is paramount to the safety of both the environment and the global population. However, many nuclear assets are sealed, hard to access, and operate in high-radiation environments. This makes routine inspections and maintenance a challenging endeavor. My research develops non-destructive inspection methods for nuclear infrastructure to ensure that the nuclear fuel is safely stored.

Bozhou Zhuang

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Third year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Bora Gencturk

3MT Presentation: Ensuring a Safer World with Nuclear Energy

Abstract: The B Reactor was the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor and it opened the door for nuclear energy. Currently, there are about 440 commercial nuclear power plants in the world to provide 10% of the world’s electricity. The safe operation of nuclear infrastructure is paramount to the safety of both the environment and the global population. However, many nuclear assets are sealed, hard to access, and operate in high-radiation environments. This makes routine inspections and maintenance a challenging endeavor. My research develops non-destructive inspection methods for nuclear infrastructure to ensure that the nuclear fuel is safely stored.

James Croughan

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Aerospace and Industrial Engineering

Eighth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Alejandra Uranga

3MT Presentation: Tubercles - why you might add knuckles to your wing

Abstract: This research presents a novel flow mechanism associated with tubercled leading edges. The flow mechanism is driven by the wing lift, and results in high spanwise flow near the front of the wing that can loop back on itself over the rear of the wing. A well-designed wing can then couple this loop with previously established tubercle flow mechanisms to produce substantial aerodynamic benefits under certain use cases.

Sina Aghaei

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Sixth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Phebe Vayanos

3MT Presentation: Analytics for Social Impact

Abstract: Data-driven approaches are increasingly being used to support decision-making in high stakes domains, e.g., to predict the vulnerability of homeless individuals to prioritize them for housing, or to identify those at risk of suicide. The deployment of data-driven predictive or prescriptive tools in high-stakes domains where people's lives and livelihoods are at stakes creates an urgent need for approaches that are fair, interpretable, and optimal. Through my work, I aim to advance integer optimization and their interface with machine learning and causal inference to design predictive and prescriptive models that are suitable to deploy in high-stakes domains. 

James Yoo

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Biomedical Engineering

Eighth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Ellis Meng

3MT Presentation: Fewer Connections Make Better Brain Implants

Abstract: Flexible polymer implants are critical for obtaining chronic recordings in deep-brain structures, but current technology is limited by the impractical wiring that is required to connect these devices. Integrated circuit chips can take recorded signals and output a handful of communication lines, but combining rigid chips with flexible polymers is challenging due to the polymer’s material properties and chip’s small size. For my research, I invented a new method of bonding, vetted it against standard techniques, and applied it to a polymer neural implant. This hybrid device performs identically to existing devices, but requires just 10 connections rather than 66.

José Ferreira

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Astronautical Engineering

Second year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Joseph Wang

3MT Presentation: Is the Atmosphere our Trash Can for Satellites?

Abstract: Over the last decades, the number of satellites orbiting the Earth has grown unrestricted and unregulated. Ongoing plans to build constellations of small satellites such as Starlink will inevitably exacerbate the situation, adding to the ever-growing number of pieces of debris. Reentry rates are expected to continue growing as the number of orbiting bodies increases with more satellites and launch vehicles remaining in orbit. As most objects will completely burn during reentry, the effect of spacecraft demise on Earth’s atmosphere remains unknown with potential impact on the ozone layer and global warming.

Ali Ghafelebashi

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Sixth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Meisam Razaviyayan

3MT Presentation: Rerouting for Rewards: Easing Traffic with Incentives

Abstract: With rapid population growth and urban development, traffic congestion has become an inescapable issue in large cities. While many congestion reduction strategies have been implemented in the past, they have not yet been fully successful. In our work, we design personalized and dynamic mechanisms for offering monetary incentives to drivers and organizations (such as Uber, Waymo, or Amazon) to reduce congestion by changing drivers' routing behavior. Utilizing real-time traffic data of Los Angeles, we demonstrate congestion reduction through our methods. Our mechanisms protect the privacy of users and organizations participating in the incentivization procedure.

Nikhil Chaudhari

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Biomedical Engineering

Fourth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Andrei Irimia

3MT Presentation: Effect of Industrialization on Regional Brain Volumes

Abstract: Aging is a universal inevitability, but the rate of aging is not uniform across people or populations. Age-related brain volume changes reflect brain health. Comparing age-related brain volume trajectories between industrialized and non-industrialized populations can provide insights on lifestyle correlates of brain health. We compared Tsimane, a native Bolivian population whose lifestyle resembles our pre-modernized ancestors, to UK adults. Tsimane males exhibit slower rates of fronto-temporal volume decrease compared to UK males. Conversely, Tsimane females exhibit faster rates of regional brain volume decrease with age than UK females. Living without modernization may protect men's brain health but not women's.

Kazem Bakian Dogaheh

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Seventh year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Mahta Moghaddam

3MT Presentation: Understanding Arctic Permafrost Carbon Cycle via Radars

Abstract: Rising temperatures in the Arctic have raised several questions about the vulnerability of the Arctic permafrost ecosystem under a changing climate. To this end, NASA runs a decadal field campaign that integrates various in-situ and airborne science to achieve a better insight into Arctic ecosystem dynamics. The carbon cycles are the key aspects in this study and are not well understood in an era of rapid Arctic change. My dissertation is focused on developing microwave instrumentation and modeling approaches to help unravel the carbon cycle dynamics of permafrost soils and their influence on climate-driven vulnerabilities of the Arctic.

Haixu Du

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Computer and Electrial Engineering

Fourth year Ph.D. student

Advisor:  Prof. Qiming Wang

3MT Presentation: Creating Materials that Grow on Their Own 

Abstract: Biological tissue has been used as a design guide for engineering materials because of its great potential in autonomously growing, enhancing, and healing functions. Drawing from the self-repairing capacity of human muscles, we demonstrate how DABBF radicals, generated through mechanical stress on polymer materials, can initiate further polymerization in adjacent monomer solutions, creating a robust shell around the original materials. This process allows these materials to self-strengthen and self-heal in response to external stimuli, significantly extending their lifespan.

Julie Jiang

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Computer Science

Fifth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Emilio Ferrara

3MT Presentation: Mining Online Human Behavior for Social Good

Abstract: The vast amount of data generated by human behavior online provides valuable insight into how people interact with one another and with digital environments. However, mining this data can be time-consuming and computationally intensive. This dissertation proposes a unified language and network model that leverages the concept of homophily to efficiently analyze large-scale human behavior. By identifying patterns in network interactions and linguistic styles, this model can characterize political polarization, detect hateful and toxic users, and quantify users based on their moral foundation leanings. The findings demonstrate how seemingly simple patterns in online behavior can offer a deeper understanding of human behavior in digital environments. I apply this model to a range of real-world problems, including characterizing political polarization, understanding social influence on networks of hateful users, and contextualizing user behavior based on their moral foundation leanings. The findings demonstrate how seemingly simple patterns in online behavior can offer a deeper understanding of human behavior in digital environments.

Juzheng Liu

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fifth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Mike Chen

3MT Presentation: Making integrated circuits more sustainable, affordable, and accessible

Abstract: Integrated circuits are the “brains” of today’s electronic systems. While people are constantly pursuing better circuit performance, the famous Moore’s law, stating the circuit scale and performance will double every two years, has reached its end. The main challenges are the unaffordable circuit fabrication cost, design cost, and power consumption. To solve these issues, my research focuses on novel circuit architectures and design methodologies. I invented a time-domain data conversion technique and an ML-based circuit design tool to significantly reduce the circuit power and cost. With these innovations, I am making integrated circuits to be more sustainable, affordable, and accessible.

Shihan Lu

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Computer Science

Sixth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Heather Culbertson

3MT® Presentation: Exploring Multi-modalities in Touch

Abstract: Going beyond vision has been an essential need for many areas, from providing immersive experience in virtual reality to giving robots a humanlike sensing capability. This need is particularly important when touch interactions occur or play a dominant role in the scenarios, such as perceiving the roughness of a material through scratching or localizing the contacts in a peg-in-hole task. My research involves touch interaction and sensing, which offer the opportunities to reproduce and discern perceptual multi-modalities around auditory and haptic cues in contact, which are often overlooked or completely nonexistent in the non-touch scenarios.

Yuanzhong Pan

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Biomedical Engineering

Sixth year Ph.D. student

Advisor:  Prof. Steve Kay

3MT Presentation: Resetting Time Gears to Kill Cancer Cells

Abstract: The 24-hour rhythm of human activities are generated by circadian genes, which can form negative feedback loops to generate oscillations. Cancer cells can hijack these genes and repurpose their physiological function to fuel endless proliferation. The goal of my dissertation is to find in what types of cancers they are hijacked, and can be potential targets to kill cancer cells. I also discovered a strategy of using drugs to inhibit the use of these genes in cancer cells as potential future treatment.

Shilpa Vijay

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Eighth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. Mitul Luhar

3MT Presentation: Turning up the Heat (and Turning Down the Drag) with Porous Magic

Abstract: Turbulent flows in engineering frequently interact with complex surfaces featuring various patterns, roughness, and porosity. Furthermore, modifying porous surface microstructure has emerged as one of the most promising methods for flow control. My research harnesses this interaction to design porous surfaces for multifunctional passive flow control applications. Specifically, we employ 3D printing to custom-design heterogeneous porous materials for thermal management and drag reduction. By utilizing a simple cubic lattice structure, we demonstrate that merely by tuning the porous microstructure, we can passively modify near-wall turbulence to achieve the desired flow and thermal outcomes.

Kicho Yu

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Computer Science

Second year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. John Heidemann

3MT Presentation: How to Share Internet Data without Compromising Privacy

Abstract: 93.4% of the population in North America has access to the Internet, but due to privacy, network engineers do not have access to that. If they could access the actual Internet data rather than the synthetic Internet data and use them to improve network engineering such as speed and throughput of the network, the rate of the network engineering development would be much faster.

We believe that it is possible to share some of the Internet data without losing privacy, thanks to the current encryption technology. A prerequisite to sharing Internet data is to distinguish between encrypted vs clear network traffic in them. We propose entropy to that distinction.

Network engineers can apply our entropy detection tool to Internet data and capture actual Internet data. 

Catherine Yunis

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Department of Biomedical Engineering

Sixth year Ph.D. student

Advisor: Prof. James Finley

3MT Presentation: Why Study Balance with Walkers?

Abstract: At least 4 million Americans use walkers to improve balance while walking. Counterintuitively, some studies have reported that walker use is associated with falls. Why walkers are associated with falls is not well understood in part because little is known about how people control balance when using a walker. Tripping hazards in the environment provoke falls and are transmitted to the body through the upper limbs. I will discuss how in order to resist falls while walking, the forces generated by the upper limbs must be appropriately timed and of the correct magnitude and direction.