In the near future, the CAT's closest technological partner will continue to be the NYU Media Research Laboratory. The CAT and MRL will focus on three primary areas of research:
· scalable media - including interfaces for emerging computing platforms such as wireless devices, as well as graphics techniques that can scale from these devices to broadband interactive media;
· comprehensive simulation - the creation of virtual worlds, combining state of the art techniques for simulating everything from physics to vision to group behavior; and
· immersive telecommunication - including the creation of 3D displays and workspaces, through which people in remote locations, virtual objects, and ongoing simulations can be seamlessly combined and manipulated.
The CAT will also work with technology researchers in other areas of NYU. A near-term goal is expanding the CAT's capacity for taking research technologies into development stages. The gap between research and development is one into which many promising technologies are lost. By more fully bridging this gap the CAT will be able to:
· create technological test beds, which can produce more significant scholarly results;
· expand educational opportunities, as more developed technologies are more amenable to study and use by students and faculty outside computer science - especially in areas of business, the social sciences, and the arts - and can also be used by computer science students as the ground upon which to test further innovations;
· provide more compelling opportunities for our industrial affiliates to explore CAT technologies.

Increasingly, the CAT will increasingly use insights from non-CS disciplines to inform technological development. It will seek to pursue truly interdisciplinary work in which the creation of technology and the understanding of culture are simultaneously undertaken. We believe that this integration is the source of the most important work internationally in the CAT's areas of focus - technologically, economically, and socially. We will pursue this goal through work with existing areas of NYU, and we also propose to form a committee to explore options for creating university structures in which this convergence is the explicit mission. Such programs might even be hosted at the CAT, on a rough analogy with a body like NYU's Center for Neural Science. Faculty who cross - disciplinary boundaries, and who combine the creation of technology projects with the investigation of culture, might be housed at the CAT. For students we envision projects such as a one-year post-baccalaureate fellowship program for particularly promising graduating seniors with a new media focus, hosted at the CAT. This program would be formulated on a mentoring model, and focused on student-defined projects.

The CAT plans to increase direct involvement with industry. We now have a meaningful affiliate agreement, and plan to work to expand our affiliation program. This will expand industrial collaboration with the CAT, give more real-world exposure to CAT technologies, and provide an additional funding basis (which will be important for the plans we outline here). We also plan (as soon as space is available) to initiate a program of visiting scholars from industry, who will come for a semester or a year to be involved in research, technology transfer, and education. We also plan to develop more joint research projects with industrial laboratories, especially in the areas of focus defined by our partnership with the NYU MRL.