Electrical Engineering and The Distributed Media and Arts (DMA) Laboratory

The Distributed Media and Arts Laboratory (DMA lab, http://dma.asu.edu ) represents an ambitious interdisciplinary research community at ASU that is focused on the parallel development of media hardware, software, content, and theory. The DMA lab is a joint effort of the Herberger College of Fine Arts (HCFA) and of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS). The lab received seed funding from proposition IT 301, with significant matching funds from the two colleges. DMA Lab research addresses the discontinuum that exists between media content and media technologies, through a paradigm shift in media and arts training. The objective is to produce a new kind of hybrid graduate students who draw their creativity from the arts and their methodology from engineering sciences. The lab trains students to integrate principles of computing and communication with artistic ideas and objectives, with the goal of enabling new paradigms of human-machine experience that directly address societal needs and facilitate knowledge. The DMA brings together artists and content creators with engineers that have expertise in digital signal processing (DSP), wireless network communications, audio and image processing, controls, and sensor signal processing. Current projects under the auspices of the DMA include body sensing, motion-e capture, microphone arrays, data fusion, networking and transmission, and digital signal processing for the arts. Thanasis Rikakis from HCFA is the founding director of the DMA laboratory. Andreas Spanias from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Forouzan Golshani from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering are the two co-directors representing the CEAS. Hari Sundaram is a new faculty affiliated with both CEAS and HCFA and is the manager of the DMA facilities and the chief coordinator in several research efforts. Principal investigators and co-investigators from the Department of Electrical Engineeting include Lina Karam, Darryl Morrell, Antonia Papandreou, Martin Reisslein, Tony Rodriguez, and Junshan Zhang. The DMA lab collaborates with the Telecommunications Research Center (TRC), the Center for Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC), and the Systems Science and Engineering Center (SSERC). The DMA lab is also recruiting participation from Psychology, Anthropology, Communications, Design and Architecture, Sociology and Bioengineering faculty.