A Room of His Own
Donations for the naming came from more than a dozen individual and corporate admirers.
“‘SAL 322’ will be known from now on as the Barry Boehm Conference Room,” said Yanis Yortsos, senior associate dean for academic affairs in the USC Viterbi School.
“I don’t know of anyone with a more complete set of arenas in which he is a leader,” Yortsos said. “Industry at TRW and Rand … government at DARPA … and academia at, we’re proud to say, the computer science department of the Viterbi School of Engineering.”
A longtime faculty member and highly regarded computer scientist, Boehm is best known for his work in value-based software engineering.
He created a method for integrating a software system’s process models, product models, property models and success models, called “model-based system architecting and software engineering,” also known as M-BASE.
He invented many value-based software methods, such as the “constructive cost model” (COCOMO), the “spiral model,” “Theory W,” a win-win approach to software management, and “requirements determination,” which formed the foundations for software risk management and software quality factor analysis.
Boehm also advanced two software engineering environments: the TRW software productivity system and the “quantum leap” environment. (TRW was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2002.)
“He is an incredibly brilliant man,” said Betsy Clark, a senior consultant at Software Metrics Inc., in Haymarket, Va. “I really admire how he has reached out to industry to get them involved … it makes everything we [computer engineers] do that much more relevant.”
Boehm founded USC’s Center for Software Engineering in 1993 to provide an environment for research and teaching in the areas of large-scale software design and development processes.
The center also began to develop generic and domain specific software architectures, software engineering tools and environments, cooperative system designs and software engineering economics.
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USC in the News
for 2/8/2012 »-
The Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned USC’s $6 billion fundraising campaign. The story noted that USC had already raised $1 billion in a “quiet phase,” including the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College.
The Guardian (U.K.) highlighted two major gifts to USC in a list of the 10 biggest philanthropic benefactors in America. The list included the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College, and the $110 million gift from USC Trustee and USC Viterbi School alumnus John Mork and wife Julie to create the USC Mork Family Scholars Program.
The New York Times featured the USC U.S.-China Institute documentary “Assignment: China — The Week that Changed the World.” The documentary, part of a series, examines media coverage of the 1972 Nixon trip that reshaped U.S.-China relations after a quarter century of isolation and hostility. “People look back now and take it for granted that the outcome was preordained,” said the institute’s Mike Chinoy, who produced the documentary. Voice of America also featured the story.
Los Angeles Times featured the Oscar Senti-meter, a tool developed by the USC Annenberg School, Los Angeles Times and IBM that analyzes thousands of tweets about the Academy Awards nominees. The story noted that Mexican actor Demian Bechir received an enormous boost on Twitter the day of the nominations, with a total of 6,893 tweets mentioning him, a 47-fold increase from the day before. The story noted the tool uses language-recognition technology developed in collaboration with USC Viterbi School’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab.
The Times of India (India) featured a three-day medical emergency training workshop organized in association with USC. At the workshop, held at GCS Medical College in India, 50 doctors and more than 100 paramedics learned how to improve emergency support systems. William Mallon of the Keck School of USC said that discussion topics included the use of portable ultrasonic devices to scan patients. “The ultrasound applications help physicians make accurate and timely decisions,” he noted. Daily News & Analysis (India) also featured the workshop.
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