One of the many jobs I have on campus this year is coaching a Freshmen Academy, which is an intro engineering class that explores all the different areas of engineering and discusses the technological and ethical challenges ahead for our future engineers. I took the class as a freshmen and enjoyed it so much that I applied to be one of the Coaches for the following year.
As part of the program, we not only have weekly hands-on and lecture class, but we also have outside All Academy lectures a few times a semester. This week, the Viterbi School of Engineering invited Paul Debevec to speak to the all the Freshmen Academies. Paul, who is a researcher here at USC, has done some amazing work in dynamic range imaging and modeling. So far the techniques he has developed have been used in The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, King Kong, Superman Returns, Spider-Man 3, and Avatar. I had the opportunity to hear Debevec speak at the Grand Challenges Summit, but I’m really looking forward to hearing a more in-depth presentation of his work. Maybe he’ll even bring his recent Academy Award to the lecture!