The family that is the lab.

Paul Bogdan, Emon Sahaba Photo/USC Viterbi

PAUL BOGDAN

Cyber Physical Systems Guru, Purveyor of Multifractality, Mentor, Friend

Being at a large university often feels like walking through the halls of the United Nations. It can give us a sense of bigness, of destiny. But this cozy global arrangement can also leave us feeling vulnerable, alone. We are all looking for a family. A place to belong. Some say it’s a numbers game. Find as many people as you can and make them your friends. Others say it’s all about relationship. Invest in the few people who will stick with you until the end.

It's that level of trust that Paul Bogdan, assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at USC Viterbi,hopes to foster in all the students who come through his Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Group.

If Bogdan was asked to identify a single "compass" word or concept that embraces the research themes of his group, it would most certainly be multifractality. He loves to use it in lectures, in writings, and in casual conversation.

It comes from the term "fractal," coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975. It's Latin derivative, "fractus," means an irregular surface like that of a broken stone. Fractals are, in fact, non-regular geometric shapes that have the same degree of non-regularity on all scales.

To paint the picture, Bogdan walks through campus pointing at shapes and patterns that remind one of Grateful Dead T-shirts. He rips a leaf from an oak and turns it face down, feeling its texture: "There. This is fractality."

A leaf displays amazing self-similarity no matter what scale it is looked at; great complexity driven by simplicity. Photo/iStock

Multifractality can be described as the degree to which something can bend and adapt to new intrusions. A healthy heart, for instance, is a multifractal, self-regulating system.

It is perhaps a buzzword that encompasses not just an academic blueprint but also the make-up of the CPS team: a taskforce of multitalented, multilingual student researchers who've left country, friends and family behind and came together to change the world.

Go into any lab at USC Viterbi and you will find this multifractality. It's the intricate design that forms the family that is the lab.

YUANKUN XUE

Statistical Learning: Let The World (Data) Speak.

Xue earned his B.Sc and M.Sc degrees from Fudan University. He researches innovative mathematical and statistical machine learning approaches for modeling, analysis and control of cyber-physical systems; optimization and control of large scale dynamic networked systems; and high performance multi-core hardware accelerators for precise medicine. Photo/USC Viterbi

In 2014, while a master's student at Fudan University in Shanghai, Xue Yuankun landed the job of his dreams – conducting R&D in Tokyo for Panasonic. But then, something popped up in his student inbox. An American professor posted a research challenge on Fudan’s forum. The professor, Paul Bogdan, was working on a radical idea – using networks-on-chip to compute the 3-D structure of large protein molecules and diagnose some of our most feared illnesses like cancer, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s early in their nascent states. He wanted students to join him in combining engineering and biomedicine to help improve and deploy new diagnostic tools in medicine.

As Xue settled into the routine of a cushy corporate job and a classy Tokyo lifestyle, Bogdan’s challenge kept him up at night. He couldn’t help but think this was a call to greater, more impactful things that could potentially save the lives of so many people battling terminal illnesses.

He began corresponding with Bogdan by email. Fast-forward a few months, and the two of them were already collaborating long-distance to develop the first large-scale networks-on-chip platform with 2,400 application-specific cores to perform structural analysis of proteins at unprecedented speeds. They published their findings in a paper entitled Disease Diagnosis-on-a-Chip: Large Scale Networks-on-Chip based Multicore Platform for Protein Folding Analysis.

Xue was now ready to push the eject button at Panasonic. In 2014, he flew to Los Angeles to finally meet Bogdan in-person and dive fully into cyber-physical systems. Their findings have already put diseases like cancer on the run as scientists can now rapidly map a protein's trajectory down to the nucleotide level.