Multimedia Communications Lab

The Multimedia Communications Laboratory (MCL) at Boston University focuses on topics in ubiquitous computing and networking. Our recent  work has focused on the use of the visible spectrum in optical communications and lighting as part of the NSF Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center. Being interdisciplinary, our work is part of both the Photonics Center and the Center for Information and Systems Engineering. We are keenly interested in ways to enable future dense networking as the number and capability of mobile and embedded devices increases.  This targets indoor spaces, where humans spend most of their time, and outdoor scenarios that are dominated by the containers in which we travel.

The lab’s legacy work is in the area of distributed multimedia information systems emphasizing time-dependent and continuous media data such as audio and video and includes our work on the Virtual Video Browser, one of the first such tools that are now ubiquitous.  We also collaborate with the Center for Coastal Network Sensing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in various projects for ecological study that employ solar-powered remotely-sited video cameras.