With its diverse schools, innovative faculty and location in New York City, Columbia provides a distinct advantage to researchers at the New Media Technology Center: ample opportunities to work closely with those who will use their products.

  "We've learned in the last 20 or 30 years of engineering research that if we are cut off from the ultimate user, the engineering solution is ultimately not as successful as it should be," said Vice Provost Michael Crow. "To facilitate the process of turning an invention into a product, we have built this center around a user community."

  With high-speed digital communications links among its three principal campuses, Columbia is an ideal testbed for transmitting multimedia over networks. Additional broadband links are planned to other facilities on campus and to the New York Information Technology Center at 55 Broad Street in lower Manhattan, a center for new media entrepreneurs.

  The Center has developed partnerships with several other organizations to help it implement new media technologies. Brief sketches of each follow.

New York Information Technology Center

  Located at 55 Broad Street in lower Manhattan, the New York Information Technology Center has since 1995 provided high-speed communications services to cutting-edge, highly creative companies that are the backbone of New York's "Silicon Alley" phenomenon. Tenants such as Bellcore, Sixth Gear Inc., Sun Microsystems, Vyne Communications and Warp 10 Technologies have access to fiber optic, high-speed copper or satellite communications links.

  The Rudin Management Co., which constructed the 30-story, 400,000-square-foot building in the 1960s, spent $40 million to renovate it, adding state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment to attract new media companies.

  Tax and energy subsidies have been provided directly to tenants under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan, which grants incentives to companies relocating downtown.

  The Columbia New Media Technology Center has opened a branch office at the site and will hold new media seminars both to update tenants on research being undertaken at the Center and to hear what kinds of innovations business people would like to see. There are plans to open a help desk, where Columbia computing students would help new media entrepreneurs with technology issues.

  "These partnerships are the way to assure that academic research really does respond to real problems, and that business profits by taking advantage of the latest technology," said Dimitris Anastassiou, director of the Columbia center.

  John Gilbert, 55 Broad Street's chief technology officer, believes the 75 new media companies that rent space at the building are eager to participate in Columbia's research and gain access to new media products.

  "One goal of this facility is to act as a gateway to the marketplace, where technology that is developed at Columbia can find its way into practical applications," Gilbert said.

  

John Gilbert, chief technology officer at 55 Broad Street, a center for new media entrepreneurs

  A study by Coopers & Lybrand, Empire State Development and the New York New Media Association found that new media industries generated $3.8 billion in gross revenues in the metropolitan area in 1995, half of that in Manhattan. The study estimated the industry employs 71,500 full-time in the region, with 27,300 jobs in Manhattan, and predicted further substantial growth, especially in the area south of Chambers Street, where space is plentiful and commercial rents are inexpensive.

  Management of 55 Broad Street has provided community rooms open to corporations, universities, non-profit groups and institutions interested in training and distance telecommunications, and has christened the building's 24,000-square-foot fourth floor as the Global Community Digital Sandbox. Tenants are encouraged to participate in distance learning, video conferences, new media events and trade shows held on site.

  In addition to Columbia, NYITC sponsors and partners include the Alliance for Downtown, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Con Edison, IBM, ImageTel International Inc., KPMG Peat Marwick, Lucent Technologies, Nbase Communications, New York Academy of Sciences, New York City Partnership, New York New Media Association, NYNEX, Polytechnic University and Verrex.

The Eiffel Project

  Emerging communications forces are making a deep, lasting transformation of education both feasible and necessary. A consortium—called the Eiffel Project and led by the Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) and the Institute for Learning Technologies (ILT) at Columbia Teachers College, on behalf of the New York City Board of Education—is working to demonstrate how children contending with poverty, discrimination, and urban crowding can achieve world-class education standards by using advanced digital information.

  The goal, says Robbie McClintock, professor of history and education at Teachers College and co-director of ILT, is to dramatically improve the educational experience of disadvantaged children by connecting an increasing number of New York's urban K-12 schools to the information superhighway, developing innovative curricula and providing effective teacher professional development. In most cases, students have never before used a computer or communicated on the Internet.

  For example, students in Harlem have been able to access the ILT's Digital Dante web site from the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, the Frederick Douglass Academy and several other K-12 public schools in Harlem. Digital Dante offers a full text of Dante's "Divine Comedy," an on-line discussion group and a game in which students replace the denizens of Dante's multiple circles of heaven, hell or purgatory with contemporary figures and explain why. "We encourage students to become so proficient in the technology that they become immersed in the content," McClintock said.

  The Eiffel Project will provide an ideal testbed for innovations from the Columbia New Media Technology Center, including new image-based search engines such as WebSEEk and cut-and-paste digital video editing tools. As students become more adept at handling new media editing tools, they will be required to create multimedia portfolios that document their learning experiences. They will also use Internet tools to access remote digital libraries and to interact with experts and mentors at a distance.

  

One of the programs affiliated with the New Media Center is the Institute for Learning Technologies. Pictured above is Robbie McClintock, co-director of ILT, the goal of which is to improve the educational experience of disadvantaged children in New York City through digital technology.

  As currently envisioned, by the end of its fifth year, the Eiffel Project will directly benefit more than 30,000 students in more than 80 schools, most from African-American, Latino, immigrant and economically disadvantaged families in Harlem and Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Queens, downtown Brooklyn, as well as in Newburgh, N.Y., and will serve as a national model for new educational processes suited for use in all educational settings.

  "It is certainly possible to overcome impediments to educational innovation, provided one has the capacity to act in a sustained effort on a large scale," McClintock said. "Through the Eiffel Project, the coalition we have assembled is capable of effecting significant educational change."

  The Center for Collaborative Education, a private, nonprofit group, and the Institute for Learning Technologies direct the Eiffel Project coalition. Corporate partners include Eastman Kodak Company, IBM, NYNEX and Time Warner Inc. Public sector partners include Junior Achievement of New York, Inc., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Visions for Public Schools, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corp. and others.

  The project has received a grant of $7 million over five years from the U. S. Department of Education through its Challenge Grants for Technology in Education, and receives substantial matching resources from the sponsoring coalition. AT&T has committed $200,000 for use in 1998 to help teachers redesign curricula to incorporate new media tools. In addition, the coalition is raising money from diverse granting agencies and from a wide cross-section of New York City businesses and philanthropies.

Center for New Media

  Founded in 1994 at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, the Center for New Media is conducting research on how new media technologies invented at Columbia can transform journalism. Among the applications the Center is addressing are omnidirectional imaging, a mobile journalist terminal and content-based search and retrieval of images and sound.

  Graduate students in journalism have tested the Omnicamera, a videocamera with a 360-degree field of view invented by Shree Nayar, professor of computer science at Columbia, as a tool for presenting news reports.

  A team of nine students compiled the first omnidirectional news report, on the 1997 St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York. Students wanted to test the Omnicamera in covering a demonstration, where the panoramic feature would be useful in gathering videotape from every angle. Members of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization were expected to protest at not being included in the official line of march. As expected, police arrested numerous demonstrators.

  "The police did not really know what to say when they saw the strange Omnicamera in all its gadget glory, which meant that the omni-crew was able to get great omni-shots from the center of the mob," wrote Peter Svarre, one of the students.

  Viewers of an Omnicamera-generated news report will be able to navigate anywhere within the bubble-like panoramic view it presents. Viewers can pan, zoom or tilt in to different parts of the news report, obtaining their own perspective on the news, something conventional news reporting has never provided.

  The mobile journalist terminal, developed by Steve Feiner, associate professor of computer science, is a wireless computer equipped with a head-worn display that presents a multimedia news story in context of the places where it occurred.

  A Global Positioning System transponder relays the user's position and orientation to the computer, which then adds narration, movies, still pictures and text onto the visual display and headphones. In the first application of the technology, a user can move about the Columbia campus with a prototype terminal and access multimedia information about the 1968 campus disturbances.

  John Pavlik, professor of journalism, and the Center for New Media students are working with other wireless computing devices, which they take off the shelf and adapt for news reporting. Terminals with access to the World Wide Web, for example, will give reporters almost unlimited resources to check facts and the accuracy of material gathered from sources, even as news conferences or interviews are under way. The group expects to use the Internet tools WebClip, WebSEEk and VisualSEEk, developed by Shih-Fu Chang, assistant professor of electrical engineering, to rapidly present and edit multimedia news stories from the field.

  "These new technologies can transform the way journalists do their work, by helping to create stories placed in a larger, more coherent context," Pavlik said. "They will help build greater accuracy into our work and ultimately will provide more engaging, up-to-date stories for audiences."

  Center activities are supported by corporate partners, who then have access to pioneering newsgathering and multimedia production techniques and may participate in efforts to re-engineer newsrooms to support digital multimedia. The Center's partners include AT&T, Asbury Park Press, Associated Press, Hearst Corp., The New York Times Company, O Globo (São Paulo), Scripps Howard, Times Mirror Company, Time Warner Inc. and Viacom.