Partnering with Industry: Professor's Work Licensed by Samsung Electronics By Christopher Sutton Earlier this year, the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science concluded a license agreement with Samsung Electronics covering nine patents in the area of multimedia communications. The patents are the result of several years of collaboration between UCLA electrical engineering professor John Villasenor's Image Communications Laboratory and Samsung's Digital Media R&D Center in Suwon, South Korea. The patents cover ways to efficiently and accurately transmit images and video sequences using wireless devices such as next-generation cellular telephones and computers connected to wireless local area networks. "These technologies are at the junction of two very important frontiers - wireless communications and digital imagery," notes Villasenor. "We are already seeing a dramatic growth in the image transmission capabilities of mobile phone networks, particularly in the overseas markets. Companies that are able to offer high quality multimedia services to their customers will distinguish themselves from the competition." Villasenor's Image Communications Lab conducts theoretical and applied research in source coding, channel coding, and system-level solutions to enable low-power, robust, and efficient multimedia communications and computing. The lab includes 10 graduate students, several undergraduate researchers, and several full time research and development engineers. "These patents and the research that led to them represent the kind of significant work our faculty are conducting here at UCLA," says Vijay K. Dhir, dean of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. "It is rigorous, academically groundbreaking research, and is not only of great value and interest to the world's leading technology companies, but will impact the way we live our lives." Emily Loughran, director of licensing at the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property Administration, noted that the licensing agreement represents a win-win situation for the University of California and for Samsung. "We have been aware for some time that these were potentially valuable patents," explains Loughran. "While we were confident in our ability to license the patents, our first preference was to license them to Samsung since they were our collaborators in the research that led to the innovations." UCLA's licensing activity helps move nascent technologies to the marketplace for the public benefit and returns $10 million a year in royalty and fee income, which is shared with inventors, their labs, and research programs at UCLA. "We are very pleased with this exclusive license agreement by which Samsung scales up its IP portfolio," says Min-Hyung Chung, vice president and head of the Technical Planning Team at the Digital Media R&D Center of Samsung Electronics. "We believe Samsung will have a more robust position in the fields of wireless communication and digital imagery." For more about the Image Communications Laboratory, please visit http://www.icsl.ucla.edu/~ipl/.