MediaQ, short for MediaQuest, makes searching for video content easier in the Internet age.

USC Viterbi Professor Cyrus Shahabi is developing an intelligent surveillance system that can help law enforcement detect and eradicate threats of mass destruction.

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IMSC has been awarded the 2013 Oracle Spatial and Graph Excellence Award in the Education and Research category. IMSC was selected for its use of Oracle Spatial and Graph technologies to teach USC masters and doctoral students, its work with the Transportation Decision-Making (TransDec) project, and its presentations at leading database conferences.

Statistics during the 11 year ERC period (1996 – 2007)

• 11 start-up companies founded, 144 inventions disclosed, 92 licenses issued, 79 patent applications filed, and 15 patents awarded
• 319 IMSC students granted degrees at the Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. levels. 47 new courses were created based on IMSC research.
• 599 articles in refereed journals, 1,892 articles in refereed conference proceedings, and 10 books. Numerous faculty awards, Presidential Early Career awards, and honors in professional societies and organizations. Also produced the Best Paper of the Decade award and an Oscar Academy Award for Technical Achievement.
• 5 major USC research centers incubated at IMSC: CiSoft (Chevron), PWICE (Pratt Whtiney), CREATE (DHS), and ICT (US Army).

List of IMSC Spin-off Companies

1. Eyematic, Inc., by Christoph von der Malsburg (1997)
2. Actoma, by Jay Kuo (1997)
3. MediaFair, Inc., by Jay Kuo and Mike Wang (1998)
4. Phaethon Communications, Inc., by Alan Willner and B. Hoanca (1999)
5. Fetch Technologies, by Craig Knoblock, S. Minton, and Y. Arens (1999)
6. Xronix, by Alan Willner (2001)
7. New Media University Academy, Inc., by Mark Bielak and J. Umana (2002)
8. Audyssey Laboratories, by Chris Kyriakakis (2003)
9. Geosemble Technologies, by Cyrus Shahabi and Craig Knoblock (2004)
10. BabbleStream, Inc., by Roger Zimmerman (2004)
11. Sentinel AVE, LLC, by Ulrich Neumann (2005)
12. GameDesk, by Lucien Vatel (aka Victor Lacour) (2009) – Post Graduation
13. ClearPath, by Cyrus Shahabi (2013) – Post Graduation

Highlights (per each main research area at IMSC):

• Immersive Audio: In addition to an Oscar Academy Award, the technology was transferred to Audyssey startup. Audyssey develops innovative technologies for enhancing the quality of sound in home theaters, automobiles, movie theaters, cell phones, and portable music players and now has 40 employees (several from USC) and is headquartered in downtown LA. It also has offices in Tokyo, Japan and Seoul, Korea. Audyssey can be found in nearly 75% of home theaters, in every new IMAX theater, in millions of TVs and in millions of cars. It has won many awards, e.g., the CES Innovations Design and Engineering Award (2010).
• Geospatial Information Management: The technology was transferred to the Geosemble Technologies startup. Geosemble provides automatic techniques for extracting and fusing geospatial data sets, including maps, aerial imagery, lists, events, databases, businesses and more. In April 2009, Geosemble received a strategic investment, technology development program, and licensing agreement with In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic investment firm that identifies innovative technology solutions to support the mission of the broader U.S. Intelligence Community. Geosemble has been acquired in July 2012 by another In-Q-Tel portfolio company, Terrago Technologies. All Geosemble’s shareholders made money from the transaction. The main product, GeoXray is being used by several government and municipal organizations.
• Immersive Games: The technology was transferred to the GameDesk stratup. GameDesk is a nonprofit research, development, and outreach organization that seeks to rethink learning through play, making, and interaction. In 2013, it was ranked #6 in the world’s top 10 most innovative companies in education by Fast Company.
• Fiber Optics: An IMSC PhD graduate, Jin-Xing Cai is now an IEEE and OSA (Optical Society of America) fellow, and he produces world-record-setting optical fiber undersea communication systems for Tyco Submarine Systems. Streaming Media: An IMSC MS graduate, Dwipal A. Desai was YouTube’s employee #9 and now a successful entrepreneur. Prof. Roger Zimmermann, an IMSC PhD graduate and later an IMSC investigator is now a successful tenured Associate Professor at National University of Singapore (NUS).
• Graphics: An IMSC PhD graduate, Doug Fidaleo, serves as Chief Scientist at an LA startup, Big Stage. Dr. Fidaleo led the development of the core Big Stage Facial Capture system that grew out of his Ph.D. work in IMSC and as a post doc at USC. In September 2009, Forbes Magazine named Big Stage Entertainment among America’s Top 20 Most Promising Companies.

A Self-Sustained ERC:

• IMSC has raised more than $5M in a short period of its post-graduation (August 2010 – April 2013) from various government agencies (e.g., NSF, National Institute of Justice, LA Metro) and industries (e.g., Microsoft, Google, HP Labs, Northrop Grumman, Intel). Its management team includes 4 full-time post-doctorate research staff as Associate Directors (see: IMSC Management Team)
• IMSC’s current advisory board has 24 members from major industry and academia (see IMSC Advisory Board) who gather annually at IMSC, see the following URL for the detailed information on the latest annual meeting on March 7, 2013: IMSC Retreat 2013
• In July 2011, NSF used IMSC as a success story for its self-sustained centers, see the following coverage by Science Nation: Here
• The culture of technology transfer continues at IMSC, with two examples of successful startups post graduation: GameDesk and ClearPath.
• IMSC continues to be in the news, see the latest coverage of IMSC’s ClearPath by Voice-of-America on March 6, 2013: Here
• IMSC continues influencing USC’s research by participating at major university’s research events, e.g., GLIMPSE: Read More

IMSC Director Cyrus Shahabi presented Big Data Analytics at USC Digital Technology Showcase for alumni on February 26th. This time, IMSC’s Big Data Analytics was presented together with Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL)’s work on Big Data. IMSC and AIL has been collaborating in Big Data Analysis since 2011.

Retreat 2013
The IMSC Retreat 2013 was held on March 7, 2013 at the Davidson Conference Center at USC [Read more]

MARCH 7, 2013 USC DAVIDSON CONFERENCE CENTER - Directions - USC Map
Program and Presentation Materials
08:30 - 09:00		Breakfast and Check-in
09:00 - 09:15		Welcome Speech  Yannis C. Yortsos,   Dean of Viterbi School of Engineering, USC
09:15 - 10:00		Big Data Research @ IMSC  Cyrus Shahabi,  Director of IMSC, USC
10:00 - 10:15		Break
Intelligent Transportation
10:15 - 10:45		Data-Driven Analysis in Transportation Systems  Ugur Demiryurek,  Associate Director of IMSC, USC
10:45 - 11:00		Event Impact Analysis on Road Networks  Chetan Gupta,  Senior Research Scientist, HP Research Labs
11:00 - 11:15		How to price Information?  Hamid Nazerzadeh,  Assistant Professor, USC Marshall School of Business
11:15 - 11:30		Break
Intelligent Campus
11:30 - 12:00		From iCampus to MediaQ  Seon Ho Kim,  Associate Director of IMSC, USC
12:00 - 12:15		Immersive Journallism: Immersive virtual reality for experiencing the news  Nonny de la Peña,  Annenberg Fellow,USC School of Cinematic Arts
12:15 - 01:30		Lunch
Intelligent Surveillance
01:30 - 02:00		iWatch: BIG Data Management and Analytics for Intelligent Surveillance  Farnoush Banaei-Kashani,  Associate Director of IMSC, USC
02:00 - 02:15		Activity-Based Intelligence (ABI)  Edwin C Tse,  Chief Technologist - Intelligence Systems Division (Ground Systems), Northrop Grumman Corporation
02:15 - 02:30		When Big meets complex: Learning and Mining in Large-scale Time Series Data  Yan Liu,  Assistant Professor of Computer Science, USC
02:30 - 02:45		Challenges in developing remote Monitoring Platform technologies for Aging with and Into Disabilities  Cesar Blanco,  Head of R&D, Accelerating Medical Innovation, USC
02:45 - 03:00		Break
03:00 - 05:00		Poster Presentations and Demonstrations
05:00 - 06:00		Keynote speech A Map Query Interface for News.  Hanan Samet,  Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland
06:00 - 07:00		Reception Davidson Conference Center

Attendees
 
Last updated Mar. 5, 2013

• AshmarIP: Anurag Bist
• BAE System: Jeff J Rice, Bingcai Zhang
• Chevron: Lanre Olabinjo
• Google: Luc Vincent, Sacha Arnoud
• HP: Chetan Gupta
• IBM: Christy Maver, Roger Rea
• Jet Propulsion laboratory: Jane Oh
• Microsoft: Dan Fay
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: Edward T. Cope, Functional Executive for NSG Research and Functional Management
• Northrop Grumman Corporation: Lloyd Matthews, Edwin C Tse, Maria Penedo, Ryan Redmond, George Pador
• Oracle: James Steiner, Jayant Sharma
• Plug and Play Tech Center: Nader Fathi
• Samsung: Praveen Kashyap
• USC Faculty, Staff and Student attendees

Poster Presentations and Demonstrations
 

• A Spatiotemporal Data Cube for Large-scale Traffic Sensor Data Analysis.
• Geocrowd: Maximum Task Scheduling
• Temporal-Textual Retrieval: Time and Keyword Search in Web Objects
• MediaQ Face Recognition Analytics
• GeoCrowd
• Realtime Traffic Video Analysis Using Intel Viewmont Co-processer
• Panoramic Image Generation From User-Generated Mobile Videos
• Activity Recognition in Wide Aerial Video Surveillance Using Entity Relationship Models
• Real-time Mining of Tweet and Police-Report Streams for Forensic Applications
• Monitoring and Evaluation of Parkinson's Disease Patient Performance using Kinect and Motion Sensors
• Forecasting the Impact of Traffic Events on Road Networks
• Prism Model: Alternative 3D Spatial Model with Simplicity and Efficiency
• Freeway Traffic Impact Study of Expo Light Rail
• Real-Time Video Segmentation based on Motion Detection
• USC Park
• Trajectory based Event Detection
• Range Temporal Search on Sensor-rich Mobile Videos
• Towards a Practical PTZ Face Detection and Tracking System

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