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The NYU CAT bridges the gaps into which potential new media
advances are often lost. We understand that we can have the
most impact not by a narrow focus on "computing" but
by bringing together:
· the strengths of rigorous scientific research and social/economic
scholarship; and
· the development of technology, applications, and business
models; with
· the intellectual energy of students, faculty, staff,
and our partners in industry.
We will significantly strengthen our work in all of these areas.
Our goal is to accomplish this both through expanded partnering
with areas of NYU addressing particular pieces of this vision
and through developing programs within the CAT itself. Important
sources of funding will be continued State and Federal grant
support, as well as increased support from industrial research
partners.
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.
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