ACTIVITY 1: IMSC Emerging Presence Research.

• Computer Interface (CI) -- Research is focused on the development of human-machine interfaces for seamless and immersive multi-participant telepresence systems, head-mounted displays for applications in the industrial workplace, the extension of emerging smart camera technology for human expression recognition, advances in robust speech recognition and synthesis, digital and physiological signal processing for immersive sound, and novel techniques for reducing the computational complexity of computer graphics.

• Media Communications (MC) -- Research includes artifact-free image and video compression; the implementation of high bandwidth fiber-based interconnection networks and network interfaces for image-intensive information exchange among locally interconnected workstations, high resolution displays, and high bandwidth local area networks; and the development of wireless network architectures and protocols for the untethered interconnection of large-scale databases with mobile personal data assistants.

• Information Management (IM) -- This research are focuses on next-generation multimedia database technology, including the structuring and automatic indexing of image, video, and digital audio data; the display of continuous media types in library information, education, and entertainment systems; the interconnection, sharing, and exchange of structured units of information in a distributed integrated-media database environment; and the implementation of front-end presentation, extraction, and guidance tools for integrated media.