MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Tuesday, 07-Jan-97 15:44:05 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 5103 Last-Modified: Friday, 21-Jun-96 18:25:06 GMT
Since the debut of the first usable computer almost half a century ago, the world has witnessed dramatic improvements in computer and communications technologies. Whereas breakthroughs in computer technology have stimulated the integration of digital continuous media (such as audio and video) with computing, rapid advances in communication technology have made available high-bandwidth, fiber-optic networks at modest cost. The synergy between the advances in computer and communications technologies promises to create an infrastructure for designing information management systems in a wide range of application domains.
The functionality and the performance attained by most of the existing information management systems, however, are insignificant as compared to their potential capability. We believe that the reasons for this limitation stem in part from the fact that, traditionally, researchers and developers have almost exclusively focussed on individual aspects of system design and application development. Consequently, very little attention has been devoted towards designing an integrated system architecture that can efficiently support modern applications (which may involve text, audio, video, images, animation, etc.). Attaining a breakthrough in designing and evaluating such system architectures, however, will require orchestrating a coherent and comprehensive effort that integrates expertise in media compression, information storage and retrieval, database systems, high-speed networking, and systems engineering. The main goal of the Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory is to facilitate such broadly-based research and to provide an excellent environment for integrating research work on various aspects of high-performance networked multimedia systems.
Since we believe that many of the important and difficult research issues are likely to be ignored without an ambitious implementation plan, we are currently instantiating our research findings by designing and implementing an integrated multimedia file system . Such a prototype implementation will not only validate our system design, but will also form the basis of transferring technology from academic environment to commercial and federal institutions.
If you are interested in receiving detailed information about the specifics of the research activities in the laboratory, please send a mail to Professor Harrick Vin (vin@cs.utexas.edu).