[10 January 2007]
SMU launches new Centre for Interactive Media

Singapore, 10 January 2007 – The School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University (SMU) today announces the establishment of a new Centre for Interactive Media. Comprising two laboratories – the Business Games Lab and the Participatory Media Lab, the new Centre for Interactive Media will champion research and development into interactive media to serve the needs of the financial services sector and the supply chain & logistics sector, and eventually other strategic sectors. The centre will also support Singapore's national effort to nurture talent for the burgeoning digital media and entertainment industries.

By leveraging on SMU's existing strengths and expertise in the areas of business, economics, finance, marketing and law, the centre will develop new interactive media technology and applications which are industry-relevant, practical and useful for the business community. Faculty from the School of Information Systems will collaborate closely with faculty from other SMU schools to conduct research and teaching that effectively integrates applied IT with business domain expertise and interactive media innovation.

The new Centre for Interactive Media is distinctive for its focus on interactive business game content and technology as well as key business and regulatory issues surrounding the creation, licensing and use of interactive media. It is the first and only centre in Singapore with this focus and emphasis.

The first two major projects of the centre are:

• Multiplayer Business Games
  The Business Games Lab will undertake research and projects with the aim of creating interactive, real-time, multiplayer business games that can be employed for the teaching of business concepts and decision-making to undergraduate, postgraduate students and working professionals. Business games can be used to support the teaching of commodity trading, supply chain management, technology strategy, and business intelligence to make learning more alive and engaging. In addition, the laboratory will develop tools and software that allow teaching faculty to create new game content easily. The Business Games Lab will also build a multiplayer gaming platform to host the games. This platform will demonstrate improvements in consistency protocols, support for latency requirements for both mobile and wired clients, power management for mobile clients, and scalability mechanisms for both cross-platform migration and for response to fluctuating loads. The laboratory will create, deploy and evaluate business games in the real educational settings of business schools and business-oriented information schools.
• Viral Culture
  The Participatory Media Lab will initially focus on understanding how various licensing and incentive mechanisms (such as different Creative Commons licenses – a bundle of copyright licenses) would affect innovation in virtual environments. The laboratory will also look at the effect of content genre, media type and game type on user innovation. The work of the centre will produce data and insights that will deepen our understanding of current interactive media environments and of how to encourage greater innovation and participation in these environments.

Situated in SMU's School of Information Systems , the centre will leverage on the school's strengths to combine applied technology, IT-related management analysis and deep domain knowledge of industry sectors and business functions. Additionally, the centre will also leverage on the collaborative environment at SMU that facilitates deep and meaningful interactions of faculty across business-IT, business management, economics, finance, law, accountancy, economics, and social sciences.

Centre Leadership

Practice Professor Steven Miller, Dean of the School of Information Systems at SMU will be Director of the Centre for Interactive Media.

The Centre's Strategic Advisor is Practice Professor Desai Narasimhalu, Associate Dean at the School of Information Systems. Professor Desai was a member of the National Computer Board's Information Technology Assessment Panel and initiated a study on Digital Media in 1991. He was also the Manager for Singapore Digital Media Consortium, a relationship between companies and research institutes in Singapore and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Professor Desai organized the first ACM Multimedia related conference in 1991. He was a founding editor of Springer ACM Transactions on Multimedia Systems. He has established and directed groups in User Interface Design, Visual Information Processing, Multimedia Data Base Management and Multimedia Information Retrieval.

The head of the Business Games Lab is Assistant Professor Rajesh Balan. Professor Balan obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been building mobile and pervasive computing systems for the past eight years. Recently, he built a massively multiplayer game infrastructure while interning at IBM Research Watson Labs.

The head of the Participatory Media Lab is Assistant Professor Giorgos Cheliotis. Professor Cheliotis received his PhD in Engineering from the National Technical University in Greece, in conjunction with his study at IBM Research Zurich Labs. While he was with IBM's Zurich Labs, his team was one of the first worldwide to investigate into the economic and policy impacts of trading of network bandwidth and grid computing capacity. He is now investigating economic and policy implications of trading digital goods, with emphasis on licensing and incentive mechanisms. Prior to joining SMU, Professor Cheliotis has also served as a consultant with McKinsey & Company's Business Technology Office.