The Arts Media and Engineering Program
at Arizona State University

Dr. Hari Sundaram

Arts, Media, and Engineering
Arizona State University

Date: Friday, April 08, 2005
Place: Engineering Sciences Building, Room 2001
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm

Abstract:
In this talk, I shall present an overview of the Arts Media and Engineering program at Arizona State University. The research and education model at the program is geared towards the creation of experiential media systems. These are physically grounded, context aware, real-time multi-sensory systems, with computational elements for sensing, interaction and feedback embedded in the physical environment.

The development of experiential media systems involves integrated research in sensing, information modeling, interactive feedback and experiential construction. Experiential media problems are complex - they require a tight coupling among bodies of knowledge that are currently fragmented across disciplines. Sensing and information modeling expertise resides mostly with engineering whereas feedback and experiential construction knowledge resides mostly with the arts. Expertise for evaluation and validation of these systems resides mostly with psychology, education and sociology. AME has structured its research and education activities to combine expertise from these disciplines and train hybrid engineer-artists-scientists who have the ability to integrate these four key area of experiential media construction. The framework allows for methodology found in the sciences to be combined with creativity found in the arts. It leverages the arts and culture to evolve engineering and science. Consequently two areas formerly considered incompatible are seen coming together for tangible results with broader social impact.

I shall present our current efforts in four application areas -- (a) biofeedback for rehabilitation, (b) situated everyday environments, (c) experiential learning environments for children and (d) development of new interactive art forms. We believe the four problems will show how development of experiential media will influence four key aspects of our lives - health, everyday living, pedagogy and art.

HARI SUNDARAM is currently an assistant professor at Arizona State University. This is a joint appointment with the department of Computer science and the Arts Media and Engineering Program. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 2002. He is principally interested in problems related to multimedia: context aware frameworks, situated multimedia systems, hybrid physical-digital environments, structure discovery, media rich social networks, collaborative annotation and resource adaptation for real-time multimedia content analysis. He has received the best student paper award at the ACM SIG MM 2002 conference on multimedia for his work on video summarization. His PhD thesis was awarded the 2002 Eliahu I. Jury Award for best dissertation. He has received a best paper award on video retrieval, from IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, for the year 1998.

Host: B.S. Manjunath, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering