Newsletter
IMSC eNews, March 2004
Contact: Nichole Phillips, (213) 740-3237 nicholep@imsc.usc.edu
IMSC RESEARCHERS GIVE PRESENTATIONS AT CENIC - IMSC researchers gave major presentations to the annual conference of the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) in March in Marina del Rey. CENIC is the non-profit corporation overseeing the deployment of a state-of-the-art communications infrastructure to all educational institutions in California. IMSC Deputy Director Alexander (Sandy) Sawchuk spoke on IMSC's Distributed Immersive Performance (DIP) project, which is developing a system to allow musicians in different physical locations to perform together over the Internet. For more information on the DIP project, visit http://imsc.usc.edu/dip/index.html.
In a second presentation at CENIC, IMSC key investigator Roger Zimmermann demonstrated the latest enhancements to IMSC's live media streaming Internet system suitable for teleconferencing, which provides high-definition (HD) video and two-channel audio at about one-tenth of the cost of systems in commercial use today. Prof. Zimmermann showed two new enhancements-the system's latency, or delay, has been reduced from two seconds to one-third of a second, and the system can now be switched back and forth at the touch of a button between high-definition resolution and standard television resolution. These two enhancements have been developed in the past two months since IMSC's January debut of this breakthrough teleconferencing system. The system is based on IMSC's HYDRA media streaming technology, which is available for licensing. For more information on HYDRA (High Performance Data Recording Architecture), visit http://dmrl.usc.edu/hydra. For information on licensing HYDRA technology, contact Isaac Maya, IMSC's Director of Industry and Technology Transfer Programs, at (213) 740-2592.
IMSC WILL PARTICIPATE IN NEW USC MOBILE MEDIA INSTITUTE - IMSC will participate with other USC research centers in a new USC Mobile Media Institute (MMI) launched in March. MMI will focus on research in the areas of wireless communications, entertainment and information. Six USC Schools joined together to form the institute: the Marshall School of Business, School of Cinema-Television, Annenberg School for Communication, Viterbi School of Engineering, Law School and Thornton School of Music. The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) is a founding sponsor of MMI. The institute also has the support of the Wireless Internet Caucus, a component of CTIA.
PROF. SCHOLTZ TO DELIVER ULTRAWIDEBAND TECHNOLOGY PLENARY TALK - Prof. Robert Scholtz, a specialist in ultrawideband (UWB) radio technology, will give the plenary talk at the Third Annual Conference on UWB Systems and Technologies, May 18-21, in Kyoto, Japan. He will discuss research on UWB indoor propagation and its effect on UWB radio design. The conference sponsor is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Dr. Scholtz, a professor of electrical engineering, is the founder and director of the UltRa Lab, a key research laboratory in the nation for the study of UWB radio technology. Last August, Dr. Scholtz received an endowed professorship, the Fred H. Cole Professorship in Engineering. UWB technology uses pulses of radio energy rather than radio waves to transmit information wirelessly in a digital form, offering a broad range of possible applications, from home networking to radio frequency (RF) tagging, to advanced radar systems. For more information on IMSC's UWB technology research, visit http://imsc.usc.edu/research/project/ultrawideband/index.html.
IMSC IN THE NEWS - Media coverage of Prof. Shri Narayanan and IMSC's project on voice recognition for telephone call centers continued at a fast pace in February and March. Prof. Narayanan and his team are developing the system to recognize frustration in the voice of callers when they use phone answering systems that respond to verbal input. He and his students were featured by television reporter Lisa Sigell in a report aired in March on two Los Angeles sister stations, KCBS, Channel 2, and KCAL, Channel 9. Other media covering the project in February and March included the Financial Times of London; the British Broadcasting System (two radio programs); Inc. magazine; and Focus, a major German newsmagazine headquartered in Munich. Go to http://imsc.usc.edu/research/project/emotionssound/index.html or more information on this IMSC voice recognition system.
The Integrated Media Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center at the University of Southern California.