An ETC is a research center dedicated to sectors that combine arts and technology, such as games and film. Plans are underway for opening ETCs in Korea and Australia following the one in Pittsburgh, USA where CMU is located.

In a meeting with reporters of this newspaper on May 23, Don Marinelli (co-director of the ETC, photo), a professor at CMU, said, “We are planning to set up ETC Korea within the second half of this year and recruit Korean students as early as the next fall semester.” He flew to Korea on May 21 to take care of arrangements related to the opening of ETC Korea.

ETC Korea will be a combination research institute and graduate school. It will conduct research of digital image special effects that are applied to games and technologies on movies, animations, virtual reality and sound engineering and produce content. Those who complete the two-year (four-semester) course at ETC will earn a master’s degree in entertainment engineering.

Lectures by U.S. professors and joint research with Korean companies or government organizations as mid-to-long-term initiatives are planned.

Professor Marinelli cited, “Korea is home to the world’s most talented youths in the digital content sector, including games and movies,” as the reason for selecting Korea.

CMU was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie, a renowned U.S. iron and steel tycoon.

The School is leading the world in search engines, linguistic engineering and artificial intelligence, which is evident in the fact that Lycos and Java technologies were invented in the school. It also has a long tradition in arts, opening a degree-granting program in “drama” in 1914 for the first time in the world.

It is ETC that is the result of combining those two strengths. ETC was set up in 1998 by the joint participation of the school’s arts college and computer science department.

Professor Marinelli said, “The ETC is so competitive that EA, also known as MS of the games industry, announced that it was willing to hire 40 percent of ETC graduates every year.”