To Become a Sponsor

The Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center is a joint initiative between the School of Computer Science and the College of Fine Arts. The mission of the Entertainment Technology Center is to provide leadership in education and research that combines technology and fine arts to create new processes, tools, and vision for storytelling and entertainment.

The Entertainment Technology Center pursues this mission through a multi-tiered approach: a graduate academic program leading to a master of entertainment technology degree; entrepreneurialism, wherein technologies developed in-house by students, staff, and faculty are licensed to appropriate companies, or spun off into their own corporate entities; and, finally, through dedicated industry research through official membership in the Entertainment Technology Center.

Full membership in the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center is available to interested corporations and other institutional entities at the rate of $50,000 per semester. Each semester is comprised basically of 15 weeks.

In exchange for full membership in the ETC, the Center will undertake one fifteen-week project focusing on entertainment technology issues related directly to the corporation's specific needs and interests.

When establishing an ETC membership, the Entertainment Technology Center will assign a team of matriculating ETC students, under the supervision of a faculty member, to work with designated individuals within the sponsoring company to identify a particular area of research to be pursued over the course of seven or fourteen weeks. The ETC will undertake a "best effort" initiative to achieve as fully as possible the stated goals of the intended research. The ETC cannot promise under any circumstance however the creation of commercially viable product under these rigorous timeframes.

Memberships require payment to Carnegie Mellon University at the time the agreement is signed between the corporate sponsor and the ETC. Checks or bank drafts should be made payable to "Carnegie Mellon University" with "Entertainment Technology Center" as the designated recipient in the memo section.

The Intellectual Property Rights policy at Carnegie Mellon University states that students retain rights to any technology developed for a course for which they have paid tuition and received academic credit. A company may, however, ask students to sign a Memorandum of Understanding forfeiting this right when the work involves the corporate sponsor's proprietary source code.

The Entertainment Technology Center, working in conjunction with the corporate sponsor, will compose and coordinate the signing of such a "Memorandum of Understanding."

To become a member of the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center, please contact:

Dr. Donald Marinelli, Executive Producer
Entertainment Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University
700 Technology Drive
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219
Phone: 412.268.3737