USC Trojan Family

USC Trojan Family (4 March, ’87)

John Kirlin is elected into U.S. national academy of public administration

John Kirlin, the Emery Evans Olson Professor of Public Administration at USC, has been elected to the National Academy of Public Administration.

In addition to Kirlin, USC currently has nine members in this academy, more than any other college or university in the country.

The National Academy of Public Administration is one of only two congressionally chartered academies in the history of the United States. The charter for the National Academy of Science was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and later was broadened to include the National Academy of Engineering. The National Academy of Public Administration charter was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Kirlin has served as a consultant to the state of California on public debt, the state of Alaska on local government, the Princeton University Urban and Regional Research Center on the Reagan Domestic Program, Citibank and Kidder-Peabody on strategy in the tax-exempt securities industry and the Rand Corp. on municipal services.

He is co-editing California Policy Choices: Volume III (University of Southern California, 1986), the third book in an annual series that seeks to improve the process of public policy making by increasing citizens’ and policy makers’ understanding of the choices to be made.

A native of Iowa and an alumnus of UCLA, he joined the USC faculty in 1969 as an assistant professor of public administration. He is assigned to the Sacramento Public Affairs Center, where he teaches public administration, administrative theory and public-private entrepreneurship.

He was associate dean of the School of Public Administration from 1974 to 1976, serving as interim dean from 1975 to 1976. He was co-director of the school’s Sacramento Public Affairs Center from 1982 to 1983. He was named to the Emery Evans Olson Chair in Public-Private Entrepreneurship in 1986.

Other USC members of the National Academy of Public Administration are Robert P. Biller, executive vice provost; public administration dean T. Ross Clayton; and professors of public administration Houston I. Flournoy, E. Kim Nelson, Chester A. Newland, William W. Parsons, Francine F. Rabinovitz, Joseph S. Wholey and emeritus professor Henry Reining, Jr.

Kent Robinson

Systems engineer Gerald Nadler is IBM Professor of Engineering Management

Gerald Nadler, chairman of the department of industrial and systems engineering, has been appointed the first IBM Professor of Engineering Management at USC.

The appointment comes after an extensive nationwide search to fill the professorship, which was created to foster interaction between engineering and other disciplines.

Nadler’s early contributions of statistical techniques in work measurement and methods engineering advanced industrial engineering theory. His studies of human motion patterns led to a

patented ultrasonic measuring device. He contributed to the design and implementation of a national gypsy moth pest-management system, and he pioneered industrial engineering applications in hospitals and educational systems.

Before coming to USC in 1983, Nadler served as professor of industrial engineering at Washington University (1949-1964) and professor of industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1964-1983), where he founded the industrial engineering department. While at Madison, he also taught in the department of urban and regional planning.

Nadler earned all three of his degrees at Purdue University—a B.S. in mechanical engineering (1945), an M.S. in industrial engineering (1946) and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering (1949).

His books include Work Simplification (McGraw-Hill, 1957), Work Design (Richard D. Irwin Inc., 1963), Design Concepts for Information

Systems (ITE Press, 1975) and The Planning and Design Approach John Wiley, 1981), for which he was given the Book of the Year Award by the Institute of Industrial Engineers.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as a member of the American Society for Engineering Education, the Institute of Management Science, the American Association of University Professors, the World Future Society, and the Council for the Understanding of Technology in Human Affairs.

Among his awards are a Gilbreth Medal from the Society for Advancement of Management and an editorial award from Hospital Management magazine. He also received a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award from Purdue University.

Los Angeles is the textbook city for the 21st century, says urban geographer Michael Dear

Today’s crop of urban analysts acknowledges a debt to the literary critics. Especially to the people who thought up structuralism.

For contemporary city planners, the old metaphors don’t apply any more. No longer can cities be described as living organisms. According to geographer Michael Dear, it would be more apt to describe a city as a text. It is something one can read and interpret.

Dear was one of the organizers of a conference, held at USC in November, on developmental trends in Los Angeles. A professor of geography as well as urban and regional planning, he worked for a time as a city planner in London.

Pressed for a literary metaphor for Los Angeles, he suggests that “Gormenghast” would do quite nicely.

Gormenghast is the name of a mythical castle which figures in a tormented trilogy of Gothic novels by British writer Mervyn Peake. “It is a huge structure,” says Dear, “which would seem, at first glance, to be complex and impenetrable. But to those who know its workings, it provides a way to rewards and satisfaction.”

It has also transformed itself, he says, into the paradigm of city growth for the rest of this century and the formative years of the next.

“Our thesis is simply this,” he told his colleagues at the conference: “In its absolute size, its huge scale of decentralization, its polycentrism, LA is the

archetype for future urban development.

“It is, in fact, the capital of the 21st century.”

Dear acknowledges that this may well come as a shock to those who have delighted, over the years, in perpetuating a somewhat less flattering image of Los Angeles.

Most Americans are familiar with the standard LA cliches: That the city is the mecca for the nation’s “fruits and nuts,” a group of suburbs in search of a city, a fantasy landscape distinguished by a number of classic ecologies—the Beaches, the Hills and, of course, the Freeways (otherwise known as “Autopia”’).

But according to Dear, the city has largely replaced Chicago—since the 1930s the accepted prototype for metropolitan development—as the world’s premier post-modern city.

The Chicago model proved potent and enduring for as long as it did because it best exemplified the growth of a city around a ‘downtown’ core of urban socio-economic activity.

Throughout the Third World, however, a different kind of city was taking root—a large, sprawling entity with several centers of activity. But neither Sao Paulo in Brazil nor Mexico City succeeded in taking the wind out of Chicago's sails because they simply didn’t work well enough as major international urban centers.

Los Angeles, however, is a different story.

While the world was dismissing the city as an urban aberration, it has gone quietly about its business supplanting the Chicago

model as the shape of cities to come. It has done (Continued on page 19)

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so, Dear says, “by imposing a First World economic and financial system on a Third World urban structure.”

Urban analysts are intrigued by a number of developments here, notably by an ongoing process of large-scale economic restructuring. Many key industries—the automotive being a good example—have either closed down or moved out to the suburbs or beyond.

But while deindustrialization has been pronounced, Los Angeles has concurrently reindustrialized along different lines entirely. “It’s estimated that at least half of the local economy is tied up now with the defense industries,” says Dear.

Los Angeles has also undergone massive geographical restructuring. The conventional downtown area, which had apparently lost out to the city’s Drang nach Osten, has since been revitalized. Moreover, says Dear, this in-town revitalization has been accompanied by the birth of massive suburban tracts, perhaps best epitomized in Orange County.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has taken on the ambiance of an international city. It is playing an increasingly significant role in the world economy, and especially in the booming Pacific Rim. And it has made considerable gains in attracting major in-

While the world was dismissing Los Angeles as an urban aberration, it has gone quietly y about its business supplanting the Chicago model as the shape of cities to come.

ternational capital investment.

The city has also attracted significant waves of immigration, from the east and south, that have provided it with a pronounced ethnic flavor.

On the debit side, says Dear, LA is not an ideal place to live. And it won't get a lot better in the short or middle term without strenuous effort. For

example:

© The city is overcrowded, and the poor and lower-income segments of the population will continue to find themselves pressed for affordable

living space.

O The glut of automobiles on a transportation network ill-equipped to accommodate it may eventually lead to the gridlock urban planners have been warning about for so long.

O The quality of air will deteriorate yet further. Dear notes that studies are now indicating that the

kinds of air pollution (see box). Acid fog and rain, especially in the beach communities, will persist, while Pasadena, Glendale and the eastern communities continue to face daunting breathing hazards. O Because of its size, LA will continue to be plagued by massive social problems such as homelessness and drug abuse. Of course these are national in scale, but Dear believes that they are intensified in LA because the city is so large. “These factors are going to make LA seem

more and more like an overcrowded Third World city with the superficial gloss of an advanced world city, in terms of its economic and financial activities,” he says.

But Dear insists that he is not trying to portray LAas a nascent Mexico City. “The standard of living here is far superior, on the average.”

In fact, the city’s decentralized, sprawling structure makes it an ideal candidate for survival well into the next century. “It works as well as it does,” says Dear, “‘because its nodes of activity are so spread out. Had LA been founded around a single downtown core, it would have stopped long age.”

Consequently, LA has established an image not

only as an exciting place to live, but as an exciting city to study as well. Perhaps because it has made a convincing case for itself as an important postmodern center, it has become attractive to academics caught up in the thrall of post-modern approaches to the social sciences.

“We've gone out in the past and counted the new buildings and cars and have analyzed the city’s economic and social structure,”’ explains Dear. “But we are now doing it with a more cultured and educated eye, a new awareness, both of the city and of what we are trying to achieve.”

It’s a matter, he says, of reading between the lines.

Sheldon Teitelbaum

| PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA/VOLUME 49/NUMBER 5/APRIL 1987

The Arnold Schoenberg Institute: _ Aliving monument toa giant =~ of contemporary milsic 347)

Also in this issue: SF at SC . . . Photonic technology may light the way to the future . .. Who cares for the caregivers? \

of combining the television

and telephone into a two-way communications system seemed to make a great deal of commercial sense, people called these devices “picture-phones.””

Though a few not terribly impressive prototypes could occasionally be glimpsed at fairs or on TV, they never quite made it to the mass market. This was because the cables that carried the nation’s telephone traffic couldn’t handle the load created by high-resolution, home-to-home video signals. Laying in the required wiring would have threatened to deplete world copper resources while blocking out the skies or choking the earth with thick webs of coaxial cables.

Today, researchers at USC’s 18-month-old Center for Photonic Technology are working intensively on lightwave technologies that may lead far beyond the simple idea of cheap home video telephones, into areas such as the design of machines capable of intelligently interpreting visual images.

Or, a bit farther up the line, they envision truly functional optical computers, which will rely upon lightcarrying photons instead of the charged electrons presently used by digital machines. Such computers, they believe, could conceivably make short shrift of the ongoing Japanese bid for computing supremacy through the development of a “fifth generation” system.

Researcher Stephen R. Forrest, who left Bell Laboratories last year to join the School of Engineering faculty, is spending much of his time, lately, contemplating an assortment of unusual semiconductors: unusual because of the way in which they interact with and manipulate optical signals.

The trick is to discover a compound out of which cheap optical analogs to

/ n the 1950s when the idea

the silicon microchip can be manufactured. Neither Forrest nor his colleagues at the center are entirely sure how these components will ultimately be made. But they know that without them, the photonic technology they envision will never really take off.

This would be tragic because photons have a great deal to recommend them over electrons. Both, of course, can be used to carry information; but electrons, because of the way they interact, tend to create unwanted crosstalk and electromagnetic interference. Photons, however, do not interact with one another. Beams of light can pass through each other with no measurable effect. Light-conveying optical fibers can lie next to each other without creating adverse effects in the process.

Moreover, the speed of electronic signals is limited by both the properties of electrons and the circuits in which they travel. But optic fibers have

Graduate student Greg Kavounas eases between laser beams to adjust a deflector in an experimental optical switch. Here a blue beam is split and refused in a nonlinear optical crystal.

greater potential bandwidth, which implies greater information-carrying capacity.

Nor need photon particles be confined to a wave-guide—the optical equivalent to a wire. Unlike electrons, they can travel freely in space. And because photonic broadcast is possible from one point to many, arbitrary communications could be achieved without the usual tangle of wires inherent to an electronic network.

In the field of computing, photons promise to greatly enhance parallel processing capabilities, which are presently limited in electronic computers by their primarily sequential architectures.

Of course, the aversion photons demonstrate toward interaction makes it inordinately difficult to harness them for practical usage. Light beams cannot be used directly to modulate or switch each other, and therefore must rely on an intervening active medium for these

by Sheldon Teitelbaum

functions. Hence the search for an optical chip prototype.

Center faculty have chosen to pursue optical chip concepts based on a family of semiconductor compounds called “III- IVs" since they are comprised of elements from columns IIT and IV of the periodic table of the elements. One such compound, gallium arsenide (GaAs), and its close relatives have been the subject of intensive research and development for use in ultra-small semiconductor lasers and detectors. These components currently form the basis of the entire fiber optics industry.

GaAs may not be the most ideal substance for active photonic functions, but it seems to work reasonably well with both photons and electrons. This is important because the initial applications of photonics will likely incorporate both photonic and electrical functions.

it not necessarily ideal substance indicative of the center's underlying philosophy, which places an unusual premium upon practicality and cooperation.

Its director, Daniel Dapkus, professor of electrical engineering and materials science, is also a Bell veteran. “Too many researchers,” he explains, “use materials that they believe will best suit their immediate needs. So each one comes up with a different device, which in turn is made from a different material, which cannot be used for other devices.” This situation is analogous, he says, to what might occur if computer manufacturers decided to produce devices and software that were not compatible with any of the other systems being produced on the market.

“Our view,” he says, “is that this

[es search for a widely applicable is

by Sheldon Teitelbaum

isn’t the right approach. If it keeps up there'll never be enough time or money in the real world to develop an applicable photonics technology.”

This penchant for a bottom-line approach to photonic technology development is also shared by Armand R. Tanguay, Jr., in many ways a driving force at the center. Unlike Dapkus, Forrest or William H. Steier, the center’s previous director, Tanguay did not come out of Bell Labs. But he, like his faculty colleagues, is appalled by what he views as the wastefulness of American academic research.

“T'm not too long out of school myself,” he says, “but I've already become tired of the kind of research we typically end up doing.”

Most scientists, he says, work themselves raw “chasing the best, most profound idea they can come up with,” never worrying if that idea can ever really mean something.

“For example,” he says, “we've been doing intensive research on a particular kind of spatial light modulator at my lab ever since I was a graduate student. That's 13 years that I've devoted to trying to understand this one device. Although we’ve learned a tremendous amount from these investigations, we've also discovered that this device may never become incorporated in operational systems, primarily because it has not proved to be manufacturable.

“What we're trying to say here is that there are lots of best ideas. So why not choose the ones that can have an impact on the systems that are going to come into being over the next 15 to 20 years?”

he Center for Photonic Technology was established a year and a half ago when, says Forrest, “‘it became apparent that we have an anomalously large group of people at USC who are involved in photonics.”” “There's been an underlying feeling for a couple of years,” adds Dapkus, “that although we had people like Alexander Sawchuk, Elsa Garmire and Anupam Madhukar, each of them very well known in the field, we just weren't having the impact, as a school, that we thought we could have.”” These faculty members, each of them independently funded, subsequently set out to create a center

dedicated to intensive, crossdisciplinary research. Its goal was nothing less than the rapid realization of a generic, photonic technology with wide applicability to problems such as local area network switching, communication system sources and detectors, signal processing and conditioning, silicon microchip enhancement, optical informational processing and, of course, advanced computational systems.

Today, the center has a core group of some 10 researchers from the departments of materials science, physics and electrical engineering.

Tanguay believes that the center will be able to ensure rapid progress in these areas only by promoting cooperation and coordination among faculty members and graduate students whenever possible.

“The degree of faculty collaboration

Tanguay, Forrest, Dapkus and (seated) Steier: A group of faculty set out to create a center dedicated to intensive, cross-disciplinary research, with the rapid realization of a generic photonic technology as their goal.

Ph.D. candidate Julia G. Johnson, a photonic technology center fellow, loads a thermocouple into one of the lab’s liquid phase epitaxial crystal growth systems. The materials grown here are used to construct integrated optical receivers, which change light signals into electricity.

here at USC is unique,” he says. “For example, I’ve published about an equal number of papers with other faculty members as I have by myself, purely as a result of this.”

Steier adds that the center’s future ability to solicit government block grants will depend, in great part, upon the mechanisms for cooperation now being thrashed out.

“When you're funded by such grants, you're expected to interact,” he says. “They evaluate you on how well you do it. So this way, in marked contrast to the loner, entrepreneurial spirit that has governed most American research to date, the encouragement to coordinate will be coming from both above and below.””

Of course, common sense will also play a role in governing the discourse prevailing at the new center. Few of the researchers who work there, whether from the systems, materials or device end of photonics, can escape the very real physical limits to what they can accomplish. Tanguay, for instance, has proved a theorem which demonstrates that the achievement of high resolution, high sensitivity, high frame rate and high dynamic range in spatial light modulators “‘is absolutely impossible.”

Determining these limits is probably one of the more important tasks the center has taken on. It helps detour researchers from entering blind alleys while encouraging them to find clever ways to avoid encountering the limits altogether.

orative efforts with private companies. The idea is to develop an “industrial partners” scheme geared toward encouraging private funding for generic research over the broad base of photonic technology,

They are also eager to engage corporate researchers in cooperative endeavors. Dapkus envisions an ideal relationship coming out of this: ‘We'll provide the more far-out research directions,” he quips, “and they'll provide the damper—the real world insight.”

So far, verbal commitments have been received from five companies. The target is 15. But Dapkus, who has been on the industrial as well as the academic side of the table, senses an enthusiasm for the center and its approach which he thinks answers the critics within the scientific community who argue that a genuine photonic technology, comparable with presentday electronics, is basically unrealizable.

Adds Forrest, ‘When you see these deep divisions among scientists before a system has even materialized, this means that there are still fundamental issues to be determined. It gives you a sense of the distance that has to be covered before you can get a practical system going.

“The fact that we're receiving encouragement from industry means that most people recognize the potential for progress in this field.” 0

E he center is also pursuing collab-