GRAND NCE lays out phase II plans for a restructured research agenda

The Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND) Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) is in the midst of a year-long transition phase as it prepares to compete for renewed funding in 2014. Funded for an initial five-year phase in 2009 with $23.25 million, the Vancouver-based centre is preparing a significant restructuring of its research program to better align itself with NCE priorities and address the ongoing and anticipated changes and growth in the digital media sector.

In a blueprint document outlining its future plans, GRAND reveals that it plans to expand its funding base, enhance its public visibility, expand skills training and update its selection process for new research projects which will feature greater involvement from partners and respective receptor communities. GRAND's renewal application is due June/14 with a decision expected by November.

A new scientific director — Dr Eugene Fiume — has been selected to take over at the end of 2014 and is working closely with Dr Gerald Karam, executive director of AT&T Labs-Research, Florham NJ, the new chair of GRAND's influential Research Management Committee. Fiume sees his early appointment as a critical step to ensuring that GRAND moves its research agenda forward without an interruption in either leadership or direction.

"GRAND is a large, complex organization and I need to ramp up," says Fiume, a professor in the Univ of Toronto's Department of Computer Science and its former chair. "There's the issue of absorbing a wide array of research in science, the arts and social sciences."

Since its launch in 2010, GRAND has expanded to encompass hundreds of researchers from 26 universities touching on virtually every aspect of digital media. Long-range preparation has been a mainstay of management philosophy

"New NCE competition rules state that the full research program has to be defined to hit the road running. We did that when we began GRAND. We've been in operation since day one," says Dr Kellogg Booth, a professor of Computer Science at the Univ of British Columbia and GRAND's outgoing scientific director. "Our current budget is $4.65 million a year and it could easily be in the $6-million range. We can utilize it in leveraged ways."

For the proposed second phase, GRAND will withhold one third of the budgets of all research projects for use as matching funds — a proportion that will rise to one half as the five-year term progresses.

Extensive collaboration

In addition to pushing the research frontiers of the science underpinning digital media, GRAND also supports efforts to inform policy makers on the latest issues surrounding the sector. Copyright law, cyber bullying, privacy and security concerns all factor into its activities, often in collaboration with other NCEs (NeuroDevNet) and Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (Wavefront, Canadian Digital Media Network).

"We want to choose one, two or three big issues and focus our resources on those as well as our broad-based research," says Fiume. "These could include computational modelling of the human being, the impact of digital media on the north and the digital media divide. We have strong expertise in these areas and we'll emphasize them."

Booth adds that new projects are being defined in conjunction with receptor communities and details are being worked out between researchers and external partners. Each new project will encompass a collection of tightly coupled subprojects, from extension of existing research to completely new areas of discovery.

To date, GRAND has leveraged approximately $2 million in cash from external sources and much more in-kind.

"Many NCEs are driven by large consortia, often with big companies. In digital media, companies are separate and competitive but we bring them together. SMEs and start-ups are cash limited and they also depend on other government money so the cash we've leveraged is average for NCEs," says Booth. "In-kind is hard to define ... What we report is the tip of the ice-berg. Informal partnerships and internships are often outcomes that happen years afterwards."

GRAND plans to increase its emphasis on internships in the second phase, helping smaller firms secure the kind of expertise they require to innovate and expand their markets. "We will harmonize where graduate students go and the advice we give to SMEs, and also tap into (other funding sources like) MITACS," says Fiume. "We want to figure out how to monetize HQP (highly qualified personnel) a bit."

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