The primary goal of the USC Behavioral Informatics Center lies at the intersections of three main dimensions:
- The daily human experience and behavioral expression, which can include for example communicative and expressive aspects, physical behaviors such as movements and meta information, as well as a range of other overt and covert cues such as physiological measurements and activities.
- A specific goal that is derived from the domain needs and expert definitions. These can be quite varied: in mental health domain one may want to detect increase in suicide ideation; in a security framework the goal may be detecting an increase in the probability of committing a terrorist act; etc.
- The third dimension is the scientific signal processing and machine learning technological aspects that enable the successful understanding and analysis of the human behaviors as they relate to the task at hand.
Each of these dimensions relates to three layers of the problem specification and solution:
- How can we help the end users whose behaviors we are analyzing?
- How do we do this scientifically right through the involvement of domain experts and while addressing a societally important problem (e.g. society has a vested interest in reducing violent outbursts by troubled citizens).
- How and what technologies help in such a task?
Our mission can only be achieved through strong partnerships between scientists in humanities and engineering, with a strong investment by the beneficiaries. Solutions can only be successful when humans are part of the system at every stage of the process; from design to use.
USC BIC is a venture of the Viterbi School of Engineering with a range of external partners from multiple institutions.
Our team is strongly driven by the desire to impact society and further guided by NAS Grand Challenges towards enduring scientific contributions.