Research at Centres under IRC@SG can be broken down into 3 key areas:

1. Breakthrough in Multilingual, Multisensory and Presence Communication

The Internet as a medium is often touted as a global medium for communication. However, difference in languages still constitutes a significant barrier to it being true global communication medium. Communication Mediation addresses the core of global communication, where mediation between languages, space and time will enable the widespread proliferation and adoption of IDM among disparate communities. A focus on communication mediation beyond language and text will open numerous opportunities in disruptive communication technologies that will change the fundamentals of communication as we know it. In this area, Singapore has the opportunity to build on our strengths in natural language processing, display and connecting technologies that will enable real-time, realistic communication mediation between the disparate non-English communities of the world. IRCs in this space include:

China – Singapore Institute of Digital Media (CSIDM)

The CSIDM Centre jointly pursued by the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) will tackle communication methods to enable 100m Chinese to communicate with 100m non-Chinese. With explorations in gesture and virtual based communication techniques, the Centre hopes to establish new communication models that would help bridge cultural and language communication gaps between speakers of different languages.

CUTE

The continual evolution of technologies touches almost every aspect of our contemporary life, and the development of these modern technologies is closely intertwined with human practices and social innovations. Through collaboration with Keio University, the CUTE Centre draws on Japan’s experience in media design to explore new frontiers for feeling communication. Through the centre, researchers of the two universities will collaborate on research themes such as lifestyle media in the ubiquitous society and global computing, while utilizing leading-edge network and trends in digital content and Asian pop culture. CUTE aims to engage millions of children and families with “feeling communication” that will convey the deep feelings, intentions and expressions of cultures. Through experiments in everyday social situations, CUTE’s work touches many areas of lifestyle, including clothing and fashion communication, touch communication, food media, soft interfaces and smell/ taste communication.

Being There Center

BeingThere Centre is an International Research Centre for TelePresence and TeleCollaboration mainly based at the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI) in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. It is a joint effort between ETH Zurich, UNC Chapel Hill and NTU Singapore.

The objective of BeingThere Centre is to make major technological and systems-level advances leading to a 3D credible experience of telepresence in a fitted room using a mobile platform. The result will be a breakthrough in the quality of interpersonal communication at a distance allowing for eye contact and proper motion parallax among a group of users.

Comparing with existing video teleconferencing systems, BeingThere Centre aims to give the illusion that distant participants are all present next to each other in the same room. To achieve that, research will be done in 3D video technology and in 3D autostereoscopic display. As part of the research, an animatronic robot-avatar can be teleoperated by a participant from a distant place and it can navigate in hospital rooms or in laboratories. An Autonomous Virtual Human will be defined and will be able to replace a real participant who cannot attend a meeting. In this case, the Autonomous Virtual Human will behave as his/her deputy and will be aware of what has been globally discussed during the meeting. It will report after the meeting to the real participant.

2. Breakthrough in the Understanding and Search of Real-Time, Dynamic Data

Wireless and mobile communication have undergone a remarkable evolution, where the proliferation of cheap sensors such as video cameras, microphones, their miniaturization and high performance have pushed technologies beyond the threshold of meaningful exploitation. Today, these networks not only have the capacity to connect smart devices like the computer, laptop and mobile phone; but have also enabled a new form of “sensing media”; where location becomes a backdrop, and our senses are progressively engaged into an entanglement of virtual and physical assemblages. With much of technology still struggling with achieving a ‘reasonable management’ of archived data, there is a real and urgent need for innovative means of exploiting this huge resource of live multimedia information; which includes the capability to search and understand data from millions of real-time dynamic information streams. IRCs in this space will develop concepts and capabilities in the capture, indexing and processing of the real-time next generation cyber-physical Web and include:

LARC

The Living Analytics Research Centre (LARC) is a new joint research initiative between Singapore Management University (SMU) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is a pioneering effort to create ways of understanding consumer and social behaviour by combining advances in computing, social science and management. LARC combines the key technologies of Big Data (large-scale data mining, statistical machine learning, and computational tools for the analysis of dynamic social networks) with analytics focused on consumer behaviour and social media, with an emphasis on near real-time analysis of streams of information that are continuously evolving.

COSMIC

COSMIC (Centre of Social Media Innovations for Communities) aims to empower the next 10 million people in the community through social media innovations that improve the way they live, work, and play. Specifically, the people targeted are those involved in the informal economy and commonly labelled as “middle of the pyramid”. Numerous such people worldwide have access to mobile devices but are poorly supported by mobile services. The institutional members of COSMIC are National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IITB).

NexT

NExT is an acronym for “NUS-ExtremeSearch-Tsinghua”. It is a centre jointly setup between National University of Singapore (NUS) and Tsinghua University with the support of IDM Programme Office. The term extreme search refers to the ability to search for live and dynamic data beyond what is indexed in the Web.

The centre focuses on crawling and mining user-generated contents (UGC’s) in Singapore and Beijing in the following areas: (a) location-oriented information: includes shared photos and check-in venues; (b) topic-oriented information: covers forums, question-answering, tweets; (c) application-oriented information: covers mobile applications and associated information and discussions; and (d) structured information: includes factual, cultural and historical information. These are publicly available data sources documenting the social interactions of people within a city. It will cover social activities of people and their collective preferences and interests. This gives rise to a graph of social pulses, and the research is focusing on transforming the unstructured, multisource and multimodal UGC contents into the graph depicting the social pulses of a city.

3. Breakthrough in Tools & Applications

Singapore is an ideal place to hub, test, and launch IDM services into Asia. Itself a microcosm of Asia, the Diaspora of much of Asia’s population is living and working in this country, and our proximity to the Asian market also provides us with unprecedented access to experiment with and reach Asia’s untapped masses. IDM R&D in Singapore therefore should not be aimed solely at unique research, but in the creation of capabilities to made Singapore a “Hub” to test, launch and reach Asia’s markets.

Pushing the boundaries of R&D implementation, 2 such Centres have been pursued to focus on translational R&D that will have a near term impact on communities and companies.

Fraunhofer IDM@NTU

The Fraunhofer IDM Centre @ NTU is a research centre for Interactive Digital Media (IDM) operated jointly by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The centre’s mandate is to promote and undertake applied research of direct utility to private and public enterprise. Its research in interactive digital media technology covers a range of key topics in the area of Visual Computing. Research activities are focused on real-time rendering, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Visual Analytics problems especially from the area of science and engineering. The overall aim of these visual solutions is to improve the discovery process and to gain better understanding with analysis techniques and visualisation methods, as well as supporting teaching and learning in a variety of science and engineering domains.

In addition, joint PhD-Programmes with two leading European universities known for their strengths in engineering and computer science were launched as part of the centre’s opening ceremony, further improving the centre’s research capabilities and outreach. This joint doctorate in Visual Computing is the first of such to be offered in Singapore. NTU will be partnering Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, and Graz University of Technology, Austria, and both programmes are expected to have its first batch of students by January 2012.

Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab (GAMBIT)

Conducts fundamental research to address important challenges faced by the global digital game research community and industry to contribute towards the development of next generation games. A core focus of GAMBIT would also be to identify and solve research problems using a multi-disciplinary approach that can be implemented and applied by Singapore’s digital game industry.