By Dr. Randall W. Hill, Jr, Vice Dean, Viterbi School of Engineering, Omar B. Milligan Professor in Computer Science (Games and Interactive Media), Executive Director, ICT
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a milestone that offered both celebration and perspective. Shortly after the final events wrapped, my wife, Marianne Haver Hill, and I boarded a plane to Europe to begin a two-month study leave. It was a rare opportunity to step away from the demands of daily leadership and reflect on nearly two decades at the helm of ICT—and to think carefully about where we go next.
The idea of a study leave is not just an academic tradition; it is a practice rooted in purpose. For senior leaders, especially in research institutions tasked with advancing national priorities, the cadence of meetings, proposals, reviews, and oversight can blur long-term thinking. This time away was a deliberate pause. It allowed me to consider not only the future of our institute, but also the enduring values that have shaped my career—from my time as an officer in the United States Army to my work at NASA, and now, as Executive Director of ICT, a Department of Defense-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center.
I’ve only had three employers: the U.S. Army, NASA, and USC—and in each, I’ve worked in service of the Army. That continuity has shaped my perspective on mission, innovation, and public purpose. But this study leave also gave me a chance to explore another kind of continuity: personal legacy. In retracing the steps of my ancestor J. Frank Dobie—historian, folklorist, and professor at the University of Texas—I found myself thinking deeply about what it means to build something that lasts.
Tracing a Legacy: J. Frank Dobie at Cambridge
I first encountered the writings of J. Frank Dobie as a child. Born in Killeen, Texas, I spent only my earliest years there before my family relocated to California, but my Texas heritage remained strong—reinforced by relatives who sent me Dobie’s books, like Up the Trail from Texas (Random House, 1955). His stories, steeped in the folklore and frontier spirit of the American Southwest, captured my imagination. I never became a cowboy, but I did become a kind of explorer, pushing into uncharted territory in technology, simulation, and artificial intelligence. And Dobie, though long gone, remained a figure I returned to often—an ancestor who had charted intellectual frontiers of his own.
In the early 1940s, during WWII, Dobie was invited to Cambridge University to teach American history at Emmanuel College. He spent the year 1943–44 in residence, and later published a memoir of his time there, A Texan in England (Little, Brown, and Company, 1945). Ahead of my study leave, I re-read the book and was struck by its warmth, its curiosity, and its vivid portrait of wartime Britain. I reached out to Emmanuel College to see if a visit might be possible. LtGen (ret.) Doug Chalmers, now Master of the College, graciously welcomed my wife and me for tea on our last day in Cambridge.
Standing in the college’s front court with Master Chalmers — both of us former Army officers (albeit from different countries) — felt oddly full-circle. Dobie had walked these same paths eighty years earlier, a Texan abroad, exchanging ideas with scholars and students during one of the most precarious periods in British history. I brought with me a copy of his book, one that included an inscription from Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect behind the Cambridge University Library and the red telephone box. The provenance of the inscription remains a mystery. Perhaps they met in London, or in the halls of Emmanuel—Dobie’s journal may yet tell us more.
Earlier that day, we had retraced some of Dobie’s favorite haunts, including The Anchor, a riverside pub where he spent many afternoons during his stay. From our seat by the window, we watched ducks, punts, and students drift by on the River Cam—much as he described in 1944. Over lunch (I had sea bass with chorizo and potatoes), we spoke with the current proprietor, who was pleased to learn of Dobie’s connection to the place. While much has changed, the view remains: rooks in the trees, swans on the river, and students in conversation.
After tea at the Master’s Lodge, where we spoke about everything from the Cambridge tutorial system to the challenges of AI in education, I reflected on how Dobie’s time in England represented more than an academic interlude. He was, in his own way, an ambassador—welcoming American airmen on leave, telling stories, and helping to build cultural bridges in a time of war. In a letter later published by Emmanuel College’s archivist, Dobie’s friend and colleague, Master Edward Welbourne, recalled him as someone who “brought a great deal of joy in joyless times.”
As a token of thanks, Dobie later donated a Frederic Remington sculpture, The Bronco Buster, to the College. It still stands in the chapel gallery today. It’s a fitting tribute to a man who believed, as I do, in the importance of legacy—not as a monument to the past, but as a bridge to the future.
Global Challenges, Shared Frontiers
While in Cambridge, I also had the opportunity to meet with researchers at the United Nations Environment Programme – World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). The Centre is housed just a short drive from the university, and its mission—tracking the health of the planet’s ecosystems—is urgent. Their work spans biodiversity analytics, policy support, and geospatial science, with over 200 scientists and staff supporting the conservation of over 300,000 protected areas worldwide.
Our discussions quickly converged around a shared question: what is possible at the intersection of environmental science and artificial intelligence? USC, and ICT in particular, brings deep expertise in geospatial terrain modeling, machine learning, and immersive visualization. UNEP-WCMC brings decades of ground-truthed data and policy impact. Our meetings sparked ideas for future collaborations—applying ICT-developed methods in simulation, AI, and visualization to support ecological monitoring at scale. The alignment between our technical capabilities and UNEP-WCMC’s mission could be the beginning of a new chapter for environmental intelligence.
This spirit of partnership continued in Norway, where I met with leadership at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO). Their research on the root causes of conflict and the conditions for peace resonate strongly with our work at ICT. I had productive conversations with Henrik Urdal, PRIO’s Director, and members of the team behind the Violence & Impacts Early-Warning System (VIEWS)—a consortium-led, award-winning initiative that forecasts political violence through large-scale data modeling.
Their work reminded me of our own legacy at ICT: wargaming tools like UrbanSim and BiLAT, developed for the U.S. Army, which simulate decision-making in complex environments and help train soldiers in negotiation and cultural understanding. The overlap between our approaches—combining behavioral models, data analysis, and simulation—suggests room for further cooperation, especially in support of conflict prevention and peacekeeping missions.
Traveling across Europe, the convergence of missions—from ecological protection to conflict forecasting—reaffirmed for me a central idea: the problems we face are increasingly interdisciplinary and global, and the tools we develop at ICT, while rooted in national defense, often have wider application. These meetings weren’t just academic courtesy calls; they were glimpses of a more connected future, where defense, diplomacy, science, and ethics are all part of the same conversation.
Field Manuals to Fortran
My path into computing and artificial intelligence did not begin in a classroom or lab—it began in uniform. I entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1974, inspired in part by my father, an artillery officer who had served before me. At the time, West Point was promoting a holistic concept of leadership: intellectual rigor, physical readiness, moral clarity. I was drawn to that challenge.
I pursued a concentration in chemistry, but it was during this time that I first encountered the early days of computer science—writing Fortran code on punch cards and feeding them into the mainframe tucked in the basement of Thayer Hall. I was fascinated by the idea of building logical systems, by the simple cause and effect of code, and by the feeling that something abstract could be made concrete through computation.
One formative moment came during a summer course abroad in Sudan. Riding the train from Khartoum to El Obeid, seated on wooden benches with the windows open to the vast desert beyond, I found myself thinking less about chemistry and more about the human systems around me—development, infrastructure, governance. That experience planted the seed for a future I hadn’t quite imagined: one focused not just on machines, but on how machines could help us understand and improve the human condition.
After graduating, I served as a commissioned officer in artillery and military intelligence. It was during an assignment at Fort Huachuca in the early 1980s that I encountered a microcomputer in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), running dBASE on a green screen. In our downtime, a few of us discovered a text-based computer game called Zork. With no graphics—just a blinking prompt—you were dropped into a fictional world: “You are in the middle of a dark forest.” You typed your response, and the game responded in kind.
It sounds primitive now, but at the time it was revolutionary: an unfolding narrative driven by interaction with computational intelligence. Looking back, I can trace much of my later interest in virtual humans and intelligent systems to that moment. It was a powerful demonstration of what was possible when technology met imagination.
After six years of military service, I made the decision to pursue graduate studies at the University of Southern California. I earned both my master’s and PhD in computer science, with a focus on distributed AI and real-time simulation. My early work involved developing expert systems—writing a compiler in C while working nights at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). One of my first major projects used the SOAR architecture to build a link monitoring system, the control console for the 70-meter antenna that enabled communication with spacecraft such as Voyager and Cassini.
NASA’s Deep Space Network was then transitioning toward greater automation. The systems were complex—each antenna managed through coded sequences with unique parameters. My role was to design software agents that could learn to monitor performance and flag anomalies. In retrospect, this was my first serious foray into cognitive modeling—getting machines to “think” about the systems they were part of.
Later, at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Paul Rosenbloom and others on modeling human behavior in real-time environments. The goal was to build systems that could make decisions, learn from feedback, and interact naturally. These ideas—agent-based reasoning, intelligent tutoring, and simulation—would form the bedrock of my future work.
Building the Future at ICT
In 2000, I joined the USC Institute for Creative Technologies—a fledgling research lab with an ambitious mission: to harness the best of Hollywood storytelling, academic innovation, and military relevance to address real-world challenges. At the time, ICT was a novel experiment, established as a University Affiliated Research Center sponsored by the U.S. Army. For me, it felt like the culmination of everything I had trained for: a space where AI, simulation, education, and defense could converge [see ICT Origin Story: How We Built the Holodeck].
In the years since, ICT has grown into a world-class research institute. Our work has spanned virtual humans, medical simulation, narrative-based learning environments, and advanced AI systems. We’ve partnered with the Army, the Department of Defense, academia, and the entertainment industry to produce research that not only pushes the boundaries of what is possible but also finds its way into operational use.
Some of the accomplishments that stand out include our early development of intelligent tutoring systems for cultural training, contributions to the One World Terrain geospatial program, and ongoing research into human-machine teaming. We’ve published over 2,000 peer-reviewed papers, received more than 140 awards, and had our work recognized across both scientific and creative communities. Our technologies have even been used in nearly 50 major films and television productions—evidence of the cross-pollination between storytelling and simulation.
But more than any individual project, what defines ICT is its people. The scientists, engineers, artists, and students who pass through our doors are committed to the dual task of exploration and impact. They ask hard questions and pursue rigorous answers. They understand that our responsibility is not just to innovate, but to serve.
The study leave offered me a unique vantage point from which to assess this arc—where we began, what we’ve built, and where we’re going. Conversations in Cambridge and Oslo, moments of reflection in botanical gardens or quiet libraries, reminded me that institutions thrive not by accident, but through intention. Leadership is not about managing what is, but preparing for what could be.
Looking Forward: Time and Perspective
As leaders, we rarely grant ourselves the luxury of reflection. The tempo of our professional lives rewards decisiveness, responsiveness, and forward momentum—but perspective requires pause. My study leave was not an escape from leadership; it was an essential part of it. It allowed me to reconnect with the questions that first brought me into this work: How can we use science and technology to serve society? What kind of institution do we want to leave behind?
Retracing the footsteps of J. Frank Dobie through the courts of Emmanuel College, or sitting by the River Cam in the same pub he frequented during wartime, I was reminded that legacy is not something one constructs in retrospect. It is formed by the daily choices we make—what we invest in, who we mentor, and how we carry values forward. Dobie’s influence on me was subtle at first, but unmistakable over time. He lived a life of intellectual curiosity, cultural bridge-building, and unapologetic belief in the power of stories to shape the world.
At ICT, we are now looking toward the next 25 years. As we deepen our engagement with the Department of Defense through our new 5-year contract, and broaden our connections to other institutions around the world, I am focused on ensuring that our research continues to serve both immediate needs and long-term vision. We must be rigorous, ethical, and inventive. We must train the next generation not just in technology, but in responsibility.
I came back from this study leave with a renewed sense of clarity—not only about what ICT is, but about what it could be. I believe we are in a moment of profound transition—not just in technology, but in the questions we are being asked to answer. Artificial intelligence, human-machine teaming, immersive simulation—these are no longer speculative ideas. They are operational realities. And with that comes a deeper duty to ensure that our work reflects the values of the society we serve.
J. Frank Dobie once wrote that “I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth.” He was a defender of intellectual honesty and cultural memory, a man who understood that truth-telling and storytelling are two sides of the same coin.
In that spirit, I felt that this time away from the desk, immersed in history, nature, and dialogue, enriched me enormously.
After the Fires
But then life happened, as it does, and the lessons of this study leave would be tested sooner than expected.
In January 2025, as the devastating Eaton Fire swept through Southern California, destroying thousands of structures across more than 40,000 acres, my family and I found ourselves among the displaced residents of Altadena.
While our home was spared, the neighborhood around us was not—and we would not be able to return until May, months after the flames were extinguished.
Walking through those charred streets felt oddly reminiscent of the wartime Cambridge that Dobie had described, where normalcy was suspended and communities had to find new ways to endure. The experience has given fresh urgency to our research at ICT into wildfire prediction and response technologies—work that suddenly felt less academic and more personal.
In quiet moments during those displaced months, I found myself thinking of something my ancestor J. Frank Dobie once wrote: “No cowboy ever quit while his life was hardest and his duties were most exacting.”
Like Dobie teaching American history in wartime Britain, or sitting by that same window at The Anchor pub where I’d had lunch just months before, sometimes you find yourself exactly where you need to be, even when it’s not where you planned to be.
That study leave was, in a way, field training for the soul—preparing me to dig in when the real test came. The work continues, and I’m not done yet.
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