I had an amazing time at the USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase this weekend. Now in its 13th year, the USC Stevens Student Innovator Showcase is held annually during Trojan Family Weekend. Student teams earn a spot in the Showcase based on their demonstrated success at creating scholarship with consequence by coming up with creative, viable solutions to global problems. During the daylong event held at USC’s University Park Campus, student teams present and pitch their innovations, inventions, and startup ideas in all disciplines for awards that help them develop their ideas further.
I had the amazing experience of talking to a host of experts from patents, technology, and commercialization proving why my team and technology was pioneering the most innovative technology at USC. More over the judges got an inside the scenes look to some of the really cool applications of our technology with the military and commercial industry, as well as an insiders look into our team’s technology and why exactly our patents and trade secrets on our core technology are so disruptive to the industry. Some of the distinguished judges who are extremely notable in the field my team is disrupting and I had the pleasure of speaking to and fielding questions from included:
Dr. Randolph Hall - Dr. Randolph Hall leads USC’s $900 million annual research enterprise, overseeing research advancement, administration, and ethics. Hall’s experience includes serving as the founder for two national research centers, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism, and the National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research. Dr. Hall is Professor in the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He is the author of Queueing Methods for Services and Manufacturing. Hall served as chairman of the University Industry Demonstration Partnership, the national leader in developing standards for industry funded research in universities.
Julia S. Metcalfe - Previously Julia spent 8 years at Facebook. She spent her last year at the company spinning up a product team in the Applied Machine Learning organization, focused on democratizing data annotation to meet the needs of the ever-scaling use of machine learning across the company. She spent her first 7 years at Facebook leading the Product Experience Analytics organization for monetization products. She founded this team and scaled it to 60 people across 5 offices, evolving the discipline from operations to analysis and product management. Her team changed how Facebook understands fundamental advertiser needs by developing data-driven insights that help focus the organization on building trustworthy products.
Dr. John Wetherell - John Wetherell, Ph.D., is head of Pillsbury’s San Diego Intellectual Property group and firm co-chair of the National Life Sciences Group. Dr. Wetherell has 25+ years’ experience closing IP deals and securing U.S. and international patents for life science companies. He handles IP acquisitions, licensing and transactional due diligence; prosecutes patents; performs patent infringement and validity analyses; freedomto-operate opinions; and provides strategic IP counseling. Dr. Wetherell has written and lectured extensively on patent law, strategy, and related transactional issues for many organizations and institutions around the world.
Along with a dozen or so other judges. Fielding questions from these experts in the field really made me think on my feet and respond back with some of the exciting reasons our team was excited about our technology. Overall I had an amazing time at the event.