British Telecommunications Plc is getting really serious about multimedia over ISDN networks, and following its agreement with Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA (CI No 1,894) it has now given the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab a $2.5m five-year contract to explore computing systems that can see and understand visual images. It is seconding some of its own researchers to the lab and hopes to come up with a system that will enable users to search an image database over ISDN lines, for example to find a particular scene in a movie.
