From Cell Phones to Siri – Can Be Traced Back to ISI

USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) has played a pivotal role in the development of most of the tech you use every day. There is an important FaceOff on the technology world we are living in. The release says, Scientists around the country were connecting remote computers from different organizations, forming what would eventually become “the Internet.” This put the researchers at ISI in the perfect position to jump right into the wild new world of networked computers.

Establishing the internet’s inner workings with Request for Comments; creating the “phonebook” of the internet with the Domain Naming System; building out the system of “dots” to divide the internet into .com, .edu, .org, and more; developing the rules of the road with internet protocols – are just some of the dizzying array of internet developments made at ISI that are still used today.

Like Laptops - A portable computing device that connects to a network. The terminal developed at ISI was so innovative and handy, that it was used by the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency– the agency shepherding the burgeoning ARPAnet (forerunner of the internet).

In Smartphones - Tom Ellis, one of the founders of ISI, led a team in the development of the first packet radio terminal which would, in fact, be a precursor of the smartphone.

In Zoom, Skype, Webcasts and More - A notable participant was Robert “Bob” Parker who, soon after this ground breaking teleconference, came to ISI where he spent over 25 years. This technology, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), is fundamental to webcasts, conference calls, Skype, Zoom and more.

In Online Videos - Packet video was first transmitted by a satellite on ISI’s roof in Marina del Rey, California. ISI researcher Stephen Casner went on to standardize the protocols for carrying audio and video on the internet – protocols that are still used today to provide us with online videos of, among other things, cats playing the piano.

In Alexa, Siri, Chatbots and More - In order to ask Alexa for the daily weather forecast, Alexa must be able to understand your words – this is natural language processing in action. A huge step in NLP research was taken in 1988, when ISI artificial intelligence researcher William Mann invented Rhetorical Structure Theory, the theory that explains what makes written texts coherent. His work became the basis for a large body of NLP research, which eventually gets us to where we are now: Alexa reporting back that it will again be sunny and 75 degrees Fahrenheit at the ISI offices.

In Virtual Reality - Some technology sounds like science fiction; other technology creates science fiction. In 1999, ISI spun off the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a pioneer in virtual reality and other immersive technologies for military and civilian uses. Ten years later, the work of ICT – including ground breaking 3D special effects – was seen on the big screen in the Academy Award-winning science fiction film Avatar.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA