More than 30% of the nation's digital technology and media companies are based in California; the Bay Area, alone, accounts for at least 25% of all jobs in such fields. The numbers, statewide, continue to grow rapidly as entrepreneurial R&D-driven firms advance new applications for digital information technologies. At the same time, California industries, including Internet, healthcare, communications, e-commerce, manufacturing, and agriculture, increasingly depend upon innovative applications of digital media technologies. The opportunities and needs for research partnerships that advance the frontiers of digital media are both immediate and substantial.

UC Discovery Grants in Digital Media are positioned at the convergence of the growing entrepreneurial multimedia industry in California and the rapidly emerging multimedia needs of a broad spectrum of other California industries. The opportunities and needs for research partnerships that advance the frontiers of digital media and increase access to multimedia tools are both immediate and substantial. UC Discovery Grants are defining the frontiers of digital media through broadly interdisciplinary projects that draw together California businesses with UC researchers from engineering, mathematics, life sciences, medicine, agriculture, ecology, music, art, literature, and education. Through UC Discovery Grants, content providers are working with scientists and engineers to envision entirely new technological systems for presenting text, audio, and video information. UC Discovery Grants in Digital Media also strive to strengthen the UC-industry interface by addressing intellectual property and copyright matters that can delay research partnerships or block them, altogether.

UC Discovery Grants in Digital Media enable research partnerships that accelerate basic research and innovation to solve multiple issues affecting the application of digital media technologies. These partnerships help to sustain and expand California's worldwide leadership in digital media. UC Discovery Grants provide a gateway "think tank" for an interchange of enabling ideas and convergence solutions. UC Discovery Grants help generate the ideas and highly skilled people needed for California's future high-tech economy.

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