The National University of Singapore (NUS) is pleased to announce the opening of the new NUS Hollywood Lab in Los Angeles, California, to foster international R&D collaboration and technology commercialisation for interactive and digital media.   Mr Newton Lee, formerly with The Walt Disney Company, is the founding director of the NUS Hollywood Lab.  

The Lab will work closely with major Hollywood movie studios, universities, and entertainment companies in North America. It will focus on international R&D collaborations, student exchange and visiting professor programmes, and joint business ventures between Singapore and the United States.

The NUS Hollywood Lab is a brainchild of Mr Newton Lee, Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok, and Professor Hang Chang Chieh at the National University of Singapore. Mr Lee brings more than two decades of R&D experience to the Lab.   In the eighties, he developed Artificial Intelligence and expert systems at AT&T Bell Labs.   In the nineties, he created digital library software, award-winning multimedia authoring tools, and best-selling interactive CD-ROM titles. Between 1996 and 2006, he has engineered over 100 online games and activities for Disney.com and Disneyblast.com.

"Next-generation computer gaming is a major focus for the NUS Hollywood Lab," says Newton Lee.  "For instance, we are working with Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok at NUS and Professor Scott Fisher at University of Southern California on mixed reality entertainment.

There are also many other interesting and important areas of R&D.   For example, we are working with Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok and Dr. Stephen Wittkopf at NUS, Jeff Burke and his team at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Disney Imagineers on cultural tourism and participatory urban planning. The types of online and offline applications for interactive and digital media are essentially limitless.   It is the goal of the NUS Hollywood Lab to push the envelope by bringing together the best minds from Singapore and the United States, and by combining resources from the academia and the industry to create synergy."

"The first step to successful technology commercialisation is to enable constant and open dialog between the academia and the industry," Newton Lee adds.   As a liaison between universities and businesses, he plans to leverage his success as the founding editor-in-chief of ACM Computers in Entertainment, a renowned publication since 2003 that has garnered the support of more than 100 leading professionals and scholars representing major universities, Hollywood studios, and Fortune 500 companies.   Many editorial board members of the publication have won the Academy Awards, Emmys, and Grammys.

Press release articles: (Right-click and download)

Straits Times 26 July 2006 (Front page headline)

Channel News Asia Website Article 25 July 2006

The New Paper Article 26 July 2006

Lianhe Zaobao Article 26 July 2006 (Chinese newspaper) 

Dr Alan Kay has been appointed as an advisor to the NUS Hollywood Lab.   He is a former Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow.

"We are truly honored to have Alan Kay as an advisor to the NUS Hollywood Lab," says Mr Newton Lee.  "Alan has been a great friend and colleague since he and I met while working at the Walt Disney Company. I always learn new and interesting ideas from Alan every time I have a conversation with him.   I am grateful to have his strong support of my professional endeavors and the Hollywood Lab.   We all look forward to working with Alan on many exciting collaborative R&D projects."

Alan Kay's recent research projects include Etoys, a highly successful authoring system to help children learn math and science; Croquet, a massively parallel peer-peer Internet overlay for collaboration and coordination; $100 Laptop, a very inexpensive portable computer for all children of the world; Mentoring GUI, a user interface that can gently help users learn new content and applications; SuperWysiWiki, a WYSIWYG through-a-browser authoring system for dynamic content; and fundamental research on boosting expressivity and lowering code size by orders of magnitude.

The NUS Hollywood Lab exemplifies the global strategy of the National University of Singapore for the advancement of interactive and digital media. The Lab will be sharing a new state-of-the-art facility with the University of Southern California School of Cinema and Television, adjacent to the university's main campus.