USC to Operate National Multimedia Research Center

Giving a major boost to Los Angeles’ hopes of becoming the world capital of the fledgling multimedia industry, the National Science Foundation is expected to announce today that USC has won a hard-fought competition to become the country’s only national engineering research center for multimedia.

While the award involves a relatively modest $12.4 million to be paid out over five years, USC officials said it will unlock an additional $34 million in pledges from corporate partners and government sources that were contingent upon winning the science foundation grant. USC was chosen over UC Berkeley, Columbia University in New York and a number of other institutions.

“Our vision is to make Southern California the Multimedia Valley the way Stanford University [gave rise to] the Silicon Valley,” said Chrysostomos L. “Max” Nikias, the director of USC’s Integrated Media Systems Center, where the research center will be based. “We’re really positioned for that.”

Multimedia, an umbrella term referring to the computer, communications and entertainment technologies that are incorporated into products such as CD-ROMs and used on the Internet’s World Wide Web, is already a major engine of job creation, especially in Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The presence of a major research program will almost certainly stimulate further industry growth in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, said Susan Worthman, executive director of the Multimedia Development Group, a trade association based in San Francisco. University officials predict that the impact could be dramatic as academic research leads to spinoff companies.

A recent study by the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance found that there are already 4,200 multimedia firms in Southern California, employing 160,000 workers. With the grant, those numbers stand to grow substantially, said Rohit Shukla, executive director of the alliance.

“Multimedia will be as ubiquitous as anything we’ve seen in the past,” Shukla said. “I don’t believe anything is as integral to the business base throughout the country than this technological revolution that is occurring. It will be part of every major and minor market there is.”

The strength of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles is one of the major reasons for its strength in multimedia, since many of the creative skills involved in producing CD-ROMs or World Wide Web sites are similar to those employed in making movies and TV programs. At the same time, the aerospace industry has given the region a crucial base of skilled engineers and software programmers.

Los Angeles’ strength in those areas was an important factor in the National Science Foundation’s decision.

“Being in the multimedia heartland, so to speak, strengthened USC’s proposal,” said Lynn Preston, the coordinator of the Engineering Research Center program of the foundation in Arlington, Va. She said the strong lineup of corporate partners helped set USC apart from the other applicants.

“There was a tremendous display of interest from the entertainment industry and the hard-core software and hardware industry,” Preston said. “Los Angeles has a good mixture of the kinds of industry it takes to deal with multimedia.”

USC was selected from among five universities that wanted to host the national multimedia research program. The grant provides direct funding for 30 faculty members, 12 postdoctoral fellows, 45 graduate students and 80 undergraduates at the Integrated Media Systems Center, which was founded in USC’s School of Engineering last year.

Alliances between the university and its 47 corporate partners--14 of which are based in Southern California--also are expected to create jobs in the private sector. The award is also a big boost to the prestige of USC, which, despite long-standing strengths in some areas of electrical engineering, has never enjoyed the status of some of its rivals.

While multimedia may be best known for the CD-ROMs that combine text, sound, pictures and video, the technology has the potential to do far more. For example, engineers at the Integrated Media Systems Center are already working to develop:

* Augmented reality systems, in which a person can wear special glasses and see computer-generated markings superimposed upon the objects in one’s sight line. A manufacturing worker could use augmented reality glasses to see exactly where to drill bolts into the side of an airplane fuselage without having to refer back and forth to blueprints.

* Motion estimation technology, which makes it possible to squeeze a lot of video into a narrow communications channel by eliminating the need to draw each and every frame of a video from scratch. Instead, it analyzes the parts of a video that change from frame to frame.

* Smart cameras that can recognize faces and facial expressions. The cameras could be used to identify people for security systems.

* Ways to create oversized pictures by blending smaller images together automatically without visible seams. That would make it possible to create big-screen images instantaneously without the expense of pasting them together by hand.

But first, engineers need to solve basic engineering problems such as finding more efficient ways to transmit data over computer networks and improving wireless networks so receivers can become smaller and lighter. Those are the kinds of problems that aerospace and defense engineers in Southern California have been working on for 50 years, Shukla said.

Three other universities will receive similar science foundation grants to become engineering research centers: Massachusetts Institute of Technology for competitive product development, the University of Michigan for reconfigurable machining systems and the University of Washington for engineered biomaterials.

The National Science Foundation, the main federal government sponsor of scientific research, funds about $3 billion in scientific and engineering research a year.