Events Calendar

The goal of the monthly series is to foster a community of graduate students committed to interdisciplinary approaches.

Speakers

Harsh Vathsangam is an Annenberg Fellow in the Viterbi School of Engineering. His interests lie in microcontroller and sensor-based robotics. He is currently focused on designing devices that have a social impact. Previous work includes the design of a wireless mouse to help patients with cerebral palsy improve brain-muscle coordination, a land-mine locator, and a non-contact switch used in organ profiling systems.

A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz is an assistant editor at the online journal Anti-, and a member of the game design collective Rust LTD. He is the author and editor of several chapbooks, including Alphabet Man (Slack Buddha Press, 2010) and Count As One (New River, 2009), as well as a forthcoming full-length collection, Afeeld. His work has recently appeared in Diagram, Glitch, Hobart, Kotaku, Otoliths, Word for/Word and the Zaoem Festival of Contemporary Poetry. He received an M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from SUNY Buffalo, and is currently a Provost’s Fellow in the iMAP Ph.D. program in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC.

Benjamin Stokes investigates how digital media foster civic learning and participation. His prior work addressed social issue video games, online volunteering in the fight on extreme poverty, and training high school youth to become more global citizens. He is currently studying how civic media adoption is affected by organizational culture and conflicting frames of citizenship. Stokes is an Annenberg Fellow in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Faculty Respondent

Rajiv Maheswaran is a research assistant professor in USC’s Computer Science Department and a research scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute. His research spans various aspects of multi-agent systems and distributed artificial intelligence, focusing on decision-theoretic and game-theoretic frameworks and solutions. Maheswaran has published extensively on artificial intelligence, decision and control theory and been an active reviewer for major conferences and journals in these fields. He was a co-organizer of the 2007 and 2008 AAMAS workshops on “Multi-Agent Sequential Decision-Making in Uncertain Domains,” the 2009 AAMAS workshop on “Agent Design: Advancing from Practice to Theory,” and the 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium “Help Me Help You: Bridging the Gaps in Human-Agent Collaboration.” Maheswaran won a Best Demonstration Award at AAMAS 2010 for “Decision Support for Real-Time Multi-Agent Coordination” and a Best Demonstration Award at AAMAS 2011 for “The Social Ultimatum Game and Adaptive Agents.” He received a B.S. degree in applied mathematics, engineering and physics from University of Wisconsin-Madison.