New media projects to get money twice a year from CITO funding mechanism

An Ontario research fund is changing its grant structure to ensure new media projects receive grants sooner. Communications and Information Technology Ontario (CITO) says it will now fund projects in two rounds per year as opposed to the single flurry of grant activity it has held in past. The switch is intended to help companies with immediate research needs get access to grant cash more quickly to fund university- and college-level projects. Vic DiCiccio, CITO's VP of research, says more frequent funding rounds, which normally have a one-quarter new media component, will help build contacts between industry and the academic community. "It allows us to capitalize on an industry interest, or an embryonic industry relationship, more quickly if we have a couple of rounds per year." Considering the speed at which new media applications are conceived and then developed, DiCiccio says it makes sense to ensure much-needed capital is available when companies need it. "The idea of a company reaching out for a new technology with some university research group on something of value to the company, and then having to wait around forever while we start a round and then make the decision - that's not really a successful way to foster these relationships and get the benefits out to the company." The departure from a single, yearly, funding scrum is likely good news for the dozens of high-level research projects in new media which consume about $3 million of CITO's annual $9.5-million budget. Most of the dollars, which typically amount to $50,000-$110,000 per year, go to pay the salaries of grad students working in conjunction with the private sector on projects, some of which take as long as seven or eight years to reach commercial fruition. The bulk of the research money generally gets spent on areas other than new media, including new communications hardware and software and design and modeling tools. DiCiccio says the mix of projects is unlikely to change in the near future, though more of them are being classified as digital media because convergence trends increase the likelihood any new innovation will have a significant impact on other areas of study. News that CITO will double the number of funding rounds comes in the wake of the body's most recent spate of grants that increased spending on digital media twofold. In mid-April, it announced $7.8 million in new grants, funding 62 projects of which approximately half are new and half ongoing. The universities of Toronto, Waterloo, Queen's, Ottawa and Carleton were the big winners, with most other schools in the province receiving some project funding. Many of those projects will have a significant impact on the ability of content providers to take advantage of new technologies. As an example, DiCiccio points to a new project led by Monica Schreafel of the University of Toronto. She is working on a new interface design for accessing digital music files, and hopes to solve some of the multimedia information navigation challenges facing users today. She is working on new compression technology that would outperform today's standard MP3 format for music files, and developing tools to find and listen to online music in a more intelligent way than today's current nightmare of FTP, web and chat sites that confront online music enthusiasts. Overall, says DiCiccio, "we're really interested in experimentation with systems, innovative user interfaces where some kind of natural language programming might be useful - some kind of natural language understanding. Maybe some text summarization, things that have more user-centered design in them."

New media projects to get money twice a year from CITO funding mechanism

Broadcast | May 4, 2000

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