Cyrus Shahabi, assistant professor of computer science at the USC School of Engineering’s Integrated Media Systems Center, has received a 2003 Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Shahabi, who is area director for information management at IMSC, has received three other significant grants this year in the area of multidimensional data analysis. He specializes in streaming architectures and multidimensional databases.

The five-year, $400,000 NSF career award is for research, teaching and outreach activities involving the management of immersive sensor data streams. The other three grants are:

“Data Fusion and Analysis for Multi-Sensor Earth System Science” for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory);

“Management and Processing of Continuous Streams From Moving Sensors” for NSF (as co-principal investigator, with Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, associate professor of computer science who is principal investigator); and

“A Framework for Integrating Geospatial and Online Data to Respond to Unexpected Events” for NSF (as co-principal investigator, with Craig Knoblock, research associate professor of computer science who is principal investigator, and John Wilson, professor of geography and director of USC’s Geographic Information Systems Lab, another co-principal investigator).

Shahabi, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from USC, has been a key investigator with IMSC since it was founded in 1996. He came to USC from Iran in 1992 after earning a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology. He also directs USC’s Information Laboratory.

Shahabi is co-author of “Streaming Media Server Design,” a new book published by IMSC Press that includes the center’s major contributions to streaming media technology.

The book spotlights Yima™, IMSC’s streaming architecture, which handles multiple simultaneous high-bandwidth streams of images and sound, all synchronized to single-frame accuracy over the Internet.

Yima is a key component of IMSC’s Remote Media Immersion technology, which is designed for streaming movies, concerts and other entertainment over the Internet.