Newsletter
IMSC eNews, November 2003
Contact: Nichole Phillips, (213) 740-3237 nicholep@imsc.usc.edu
IMSC'S NEW SPONSOR PROGRAM YIELDS FIRST PARTICIPANTS:
CHEVRON TEXACO WILL TAP IMSC TECHNOLOGIES FOR DEVELOPING THE OIL FIELD OF THE FUTURE.
KOREAN AIR AND PRATT & WHITNEY PLAN JET ENGINE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM USING STATE-OF-THE-ART WIRELESS INTERNET COMMUNICATION ENHANCED BY IMSC'S BREAKTHROUGH VIDEO AND AUDIO TECHNOLOGY FOR THE INTERNET.
Three new IMSC sponsors, ChevronTexaco, Korean Air and Pratt & Whitney, will move IMSC technologies into two major industries-oil and airlines.
The Center's expertise in data management, data transmission and visualization will assist ChevronTexaco in its quest to develop the oil field of the future. The project is being developed under the auspices of the Center of Interactive Smart Oilfield Technologies (CiSoft), established by ChevronTexaco and the University of Southern California (USC). Three USC School of Engineering organizations-IMSC, the Information Sciences Institute and the Petroleum Engineering Department-will work on the project. This ChevronTexaco project will focus on the integration of field automation, reservoir simulation technologies, new and emerging well technologies, and real-time reservoir management in order to help reduce field development costs, speed up the analysis of information, and enhance operational reliability.
Korean Air and Pratt & Whitney, the company's major jet engine supplier, will call on IMSC's Remote Media Immersion (RMI) video and audio technology to develop a cutting-edge wireless Internet communications system that will dramatically cut costs and save time in the expensive area of engine maintenance. The project is being developed under the auspices of the Pratt & Whitney Institute for Collaborative Engineering (PWICE), established jointly at the University of Southern California and Inha University in South Korea.
With the system, Pratt & Whitney's engineers in the firm's East Hartford, CT, headquarters will enjoy unprecedented interaction with Korean Air mechanics working on the planes as they sit in the airline's maintenance facility in Seoul, nearly 7,000 miles away. And, as the project progresses, they won't have to wait until the planes land, but will be able to monitor the engines while the planes are flying. In the first stage, engineers at the company help-desk will work with the mechanics as if they were right next to them in the maintenance facility. They will not only view the engine and communicate in real time with the mechanics, but will get immediate data readings as the mechanics use their diagnostic instruments.
HOW TO UPGRADE TO IMSC SPONSOR - IMSC's new sponsor program can boost the direct benefits of research to your company, leading to faster development of market-leading products and services. For information on upgrading your company's partnership status with IMSC, go to http://imsc.usc.edu/industry/categories.html and contact Dr. Isaac Maya, IMSC Director of Industry and Technology Transfer Programs, at (213) 740-2592.
IMSC RESEARCHERS PRESENT AT ACM CONFERENCE - IMSC faculty and students presented a number of papers at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) 11th International Multimedia Conference, November 2-8, in Berkeley, CA. The papers included "e;MuSA.RT-Music on the Spiral Array, Real-time"e; by Prof. Elaine Chew and Dr. Alexandre François; "e;From Remote Media Immersion to Distributed Immersive Performance"e; by Professors Alexander (Sandy) Sawchuk, Elaine Chew, Roger Zimmermann, Christos Papadopoulos, and Chris Kyriakakis; "e;Creating Data Resources for Designing User-centric Front-ends for Query by Humming Systems"e; by Erdem Unal, Prof. Shri Narayanan, Maverick Shih and Prof. Chew; "e;Comprehensive Statistical Admission Control for Streaming Media Servers"e; by Prof. Zimmermann and Kun Fu; "e;Multi-Views Tracking Within and Across Uncalibrated Camera Streams by J. Kang and Professors Isaac Cohen and Gérard Medioni; "e;3D Video Surveillance with Augmented Virtual Environments"e; by Ismail Oner Sebe, Jinhui Hu and Professors Suya You and Ulrich Neumann. For IMSC research projects, go to http://imsc.usc.edu/research.
ANNUAL IMSC NETWORKING AND INDUSTRY DAY HELD - The IMSC Student Council presented the Annual IMSC Networking and Industry Day in October. Industry representatives included Darren Shou, a Program Manager at Symantec Corp. and IMSC graduate; Richard Walker, President of Efficient Technologies, Inc.; and Dean Wadsworth, a scientist with ERC, Inc. Prof. Gérard Medioni, a key IMSC investigator and Chairman of the Computer Science Department, gave a presentation on his work with Geometrix, which focuses on rapid facial recognition technology.
JOURNALISTS EXPERIENCE IMSC'S VISION OF IMMERSIVE TV NEWS - In an October workshop at USC, TV journalists got a close up view of IMSC's vision of the future of television news as they donned a virtual reality headset to explore in a 360-degree panoramic environment that put them in the news scene. IMSC researchers demonstrated the developing TV news system to members of the Associated Press Television and Radio Association of California and Nevada. Prof. Skip Rizzo, head of IMSC's virtual reality environment projects, Prof. Larry Pryor of the Annenberg School for Journalism, and Prof. Alexander (Sandy) Sawchuk, IMSC's Deputy Director, made presentations.
The Integrated Media Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California.