Plenary Session Abstract

The goal of Integrated Media Systems is to advance and integrate multimedia and creative technologies to dramatically transform the way we work, communicate, learn, teach and play. An integrated media system is a computer-based environment which supports the creation, usage, sharing, distribution and effective communication of multi-modal information across the boundaries of time and space. Such integrated media systems are today rising to the forefront as the information technology centering-point for the next decade, powerfully impacting all fields of inquiry and technology development.

The long-term strategic objective of integrated media systems is to provide a multimedia environment and portal for universal, individualized access to information sources. The advancement of integrated media systems requires innovations and system integration in three key areas. First, they must seamlessly combine digital video, audio, text, animation, graphics and knowledge about such information units and their inter-relationships. Second, they must integrate with humans, via cooperatively interactive multi-modal interfaces. And third, integrated media systems must communicate with other such systems and content-addressable multimedia databases, both logically (information sharing) and physically (information networking, compression and delivery). One realization of this vision is via cooperative immersipresence, in which the user is immersed in a controlled customized multimedia information environment. The information available to the user includes people, places, information collections, databases, the World Wide Web and its future extensions. The cooperative immersipresence portal is the access mechanism that serves as an extension of an individual's memory, supports information discovery and use, and enables interactive guidance, learning, exploration, entertainment and interpersonal collaboration through natural and familiar human metaphors, including speech and audio signals, facial and hand gestures and haptic devices.

The purpose of this plenary talk is to address the definition, properties, anticipated roadmap evolution, economic impact and application domains of integrated media systems. Special emphasis will be given in the description of signal processing challenges in the development of integrated media systems.

Dr. Nikias received a Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1977 and both the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo, NY in 1980 and 1982, respectively.

Dr. Nikias is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems at the University of Southern California, Associate Dean of Engineering and Director of USC's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. Prior to that he held academic appointments at Northeastern University in Boston and the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

Professor Nikias is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the recipient of both the 1993 Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Technological University (TV university in USA) and the \"Fred W. Ellersick Award of Outstanding Unclassified Paper at Military Communications (MILCOM)'92.\" He is also the recipient of the 1987 IEEE Signal Processing best paper award. He is a member of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST), a distinguished group of 30 members from academia and industry, that examines and reports independent and objective findings on public policy issues involving science and technology that affect the State of California. In May 1994, Dr. Nikias testified before a California State Senate Hearing on the industry growth of multimedia communications.

Dr. Nikias is the author of over 100 published journal papers, 4 textbooks and 5 patents. His research interests span the fields of digital signal processing with applications to communications and multimedia systems. He has graduated 19 Ph.D. students in the past 14 years.

He lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA 90275 with his wife and their daughters.

Last Update:  December 4, 1998         Ingo Höntsch