MMSPG 2008 Christmas dinner

The now traditional MMSPG 2008 Christmas dinner took place on Saturday December 13th, 2008, at the usual place: Relais de la Poste, a nice restaurant on the easterns hights of Lausanne, in the middle of vineyards. This was a joyful and friendly gathering to meet with colleagues and their family members, and to celebrate a rather dynamic year 2008. Some photos of the dinner can be found at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPG2008ChristmasDinner?feat=directlink

9th MMSPG lunch meeting in 2008

The 9th, and probably last lunch meeting of our research group in 2008, took place on November 7th. This lunch was organized by Jong-Seok LEE. Thanks to his wife's kind efforts and contributions, we could all enjoy some interesting and very tasty Korean food and drinks. Our appreciations go to both of them, and we look forward to have another similar experience very soon.

There are some pictures in the following URL of the event, and especially a few snapshots of some of the food we had:

picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/9thMMSPGLunchMeetingIn2008#

Eighth MMSPL lunch meeting

The Eighth lunch meeting in 2008, and the first after the summer break, took place on 22nd September 2008. This lunch was organized by Daniele Ticca one week before he ends his stay with us. Unsurprizingly, on he menu, we had Pizza! We wish Daniele good luck in his future career and will always remember his stay and the good memories he left with us.

Some photos of the lunch are available at:

picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/EighthMMSPLLunchMeeting#

K-Space meeting in Lausanne

K-space is an EC funded Network of Excellence on Knowledge Space of Semantic Inference for Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Multimedia Content. This consortium has been running since January 2006 and is currently in its third and last year of conducting business. More information about K-space can be found at the following website: http://www.k-space.eu/

On September 22 and 23, 2008, the General Meeting of K-space was organized by my research team at EPFL, where more than 40 attended. A few pictures of the event can be found at the following site:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/KSpaceMeetingInLausanne#

Petamedia SIG1 meeting at EPFL

Petamedia Special Interest Group 1 (SIG1) on content distribution took place at EPFL on Friday September 19th, 2008. Petamedia is a network of excellence funded by the European Commission on Peer to Peer Tagged Media. I have already written other articles about this NoE on this blog, and refer interested readers to those articles. Let me just say that more information about this NoE can be found at the following url:

http://www.petamedia.eu/

The main objective of SIG1 was to have an indepth understanding of acticvities of all groups involved in content distribution related topics, and to define a detailed program to collaborate with each other.

I believe this goal was achieved with success and a mini-project was defined between most of the partners present to work together on the problem of video streaming over a peer to peer network. Other achievements of the meeting were organization of a tutorial for all partners to better understand issues and trends in peer to peer networks, and to define a longer term road map to explore avenues beyond the mini-project that has been set up.

A few pictures of the meeting are available at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/PetamediaSIG1meetingEPFL#

IM2 and Affective Sciences NCCRs Summer Institute 2008

IM2 and Affective Sciences Summer Institute took place in Riederalp from 1-3 September 2008. IM2 is a Swiss National Center of Competence on Research in the field of Interactive Multimodal Information Management. I have been the deputy director of IM2 since 2006. Affective Sciences is another Swiss National Center of Competence on Reseach interested in understanding how emotions affect the way individuals and societies behave. Riederalp is a village in Valais Canton of Switzerland not very far from the world famous Aletsch glacier. This summer institute was organized to explore common interests between these two NCCRs and to set the ground for stronger collaborations between groups and individuals involved in each. To do so, after a short presentation of each NCCR, a GEKO (Get to Know each Other) session was organized followed by parallel sessions with presentations and workshops around themes of common interest. Finally a poster session was an opportunity for many of the researchers to present their research activities in more details. I acted at the moderator of the GEKO, and three of my research team members attended this summer institute (Francesca de Simone, Jong-Seok Lee, and Ashkan Yazdani). The program of the summer institute, and the slides of the presentations are accessible from the following url:

http://www.im2.ch/summer-institute-2008

In the above site you will also find a lot of pictures. But I also took some of mine, that can be seen at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/IM2AffectiveScienceSummerInstitute2008#

SPIE Optics and Photonics 2008

The annual SPIE meeting Optics and Photonics took place from 10-14 August 2008 in San Diego. Optics and Photonics is a huge symposium composed of several conferences. The conference Appications of Digital Image Processing is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) conferences in image processing. It has been founded and is chaired by Andy Tescher a well-known researcher in the field. This year, Andy asked me to be the acting chair of the conference due to some other committments he had. The conference was very intresting with a lot of first time presentations in some of the most recent advances in image processing. Among others I would like to mention JPEG-XR which is a new standard for image compression. I took a few pictures during the conference that can be consulted from the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SPIEOpticsAndPhotonics2008#

The link to Optics and Photonics 2008 program is somehow unavailable at the time of the writing of this article. But the best way to find out about the program would be to go to SPIE website at http://www.spie.org and then look for past conferences. I may update this article with the exact url, if SPIE updates its website at some point in future.

MPEG meeting in Hannover, Germany

The 85th MPEG meeting took place in Hannover between 21st and 25th July 2008. This meeting was colocated with the Joint Video Team (JVT) which is a group composed of experts from both ISO/IEC and ITU-T, active in standardization of Advanced Video Coding (AVC) also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 and H.264. Many developments took place during that week. A highlight of the meeting can be accessed at the end of the mirror article of this blog at my EPFL site (see the links on the left side). Beside progress in Multiview Video Coding (MVC), a well attended meeting discussed requirements, applications and needs for standardization of potential future video compression standards. The MPEG meeting was followed by an SC29 meeting in Hannover. SC29 is the board overseeing the activities of both JPEG and MPEG standards.

I took a few pictures of both events that can be consulted at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MPEGMeetingHannoverJuly2009

JPEG meeting in Poitiers, France

JPEG committee met in Poitiers, France, from July 7th to 11th 2008. This was the second time in the same year some of the JPEG committee members were coming to this city. In fact, a meeting of the Ad Hoc Group on JPEG XR evaluation also took place there a few months earlier, about which I already reported in my blog. This meeting was an occasion to progress with quite a few items. JPEG XR reached Final Committee Draft status and has been sent out for ballot by ISO National Bodies. JPEG XR is also going to extend its scope with new parts to take into account things such as moving pictures. Another important issue was the creation of a new work item for standardization called Advanced Image Coding (AIC). AIC has been an exploratory activity in the last few years within JPEG committee and it was felt that it was now time to officially start work on it towards standardization. The first milestone in AIC will be a set of metrics for both subjective and objective evaluation methodologies and metrics for still image compression. This will then follow by standardization of new algorithms for image compression beyond those already developped or under development in JPEG. JPSearch also progressed well in Poitiers. JPSearch is a standard for annotation, management, search and retrieval of still images. The press release of the JPEG committee which was issued as the outcome of the Poitiers meeting can be accessed from the EPFL mirror of this blog (http://blogs.epfl.ch/touradj.ebrahimi).

I also took a few pictures accessible from:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/JPEGmeetingPoitiersJuly2008

Montreux Jazz Festival 2008

This year saw another very successful edition of the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival. The 42nd festival took place between 4th and 19th July 2008, and lined up a unique collection of artists. Since more than one year, I have been closely involved in an exciting project at EPFL which aims at archiving the recordings of the Montreux Jazz Festivals and to enrich and enhance them to the fullest extent. I will certainly write another article in this blog descrbing more in details the aims of that project. But here, let me just refer you to the url of the Montreux Jazz Festival at:

http://www.montreuxjazz.com/news/index_en.aspx

I attended a few days and nights of the festival with some of my colleagues, combining work with fun. Some pictures can be consulted at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MontreuxJazzFestival2008

COST 292 WG7 Technical Meeting in Florence

I have already written about COST 292 in this blog. I refer you to past articles for more information about COST 292 or directly to the website of this Action at:
http://www.cost292.org
The Technical Committee WG7 of COST 292 met in Florence on June 30th 2008. This was the forth time we were meeting in Florence at the kind invitation of Fratelli Alinari. Some pictures of the meeting can be consulted at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/COST292WG7TechnicalMeetingInFlorence

Seventh MMSPL Lunch Meeting

On July 14th 2008, our team had its seventh lunch meeting. This one the last lunch meeting before the summer break. On menu was a collection of Hungarian food thanks to Peter Vajda who is pursuing a PhD in our group.
Some pictures of the lunch are available at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SeventhMMSPLLunchMeeting

ICME 2008 in Hannover Germany

The 2008 edition of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo took place in Germany, in the city of Hannover, from June 22nd to 26th 2008. The conference's general chair was Prof. Joern Ostermann from Leibniz Universität Hannover. I had the pleasure acting as Vice-chair. The conference was very rich in original and high quality papers, presentations and expositions. To save time typing this article, I would like to simply refer the readers to ICME 2008 website and encourage all to consult the program of this conference:
http://www.icme2008.org
ICME 2008 also featured a few very exciting keynote presentations, among which I would like to mention one in particular from Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University on cars that drive themselves. His keynote was definitely very impressive and quite different from the usual keynotes one sees in conferences in the field of multimedia.
In addition to technical sessions, several social events were also organized. The welcome event was featuring a very interesting local drink that had to be taken from two glasses at the same time, and the social dinner happened during the football match opposing Germany and Turkey for the Euro 2008. I let you imagine the ambience when Germans won in a very exciting and dynamic match with several surprises.
I have put some pictures of the conference in the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/ICME2008

MMSPL open doors day for EPFL financial service

EPFL is recognized as one of the top universities in Europe with unique research and educational programs. We have been often mentioned on the top world and European university rankings, which makes us very proud. But one of the best kept secrets in EPFL is that all these are possible also thanks to hard work and professionalism of our administration which thanks to help and support they provide, they allow us to concentrate most of our energy on the core businesses of our university, namely, education, research and innovation. Among them, for sure, one must mention our financial service. I think we do not thank them often enough for the important role they play in our successes. To show EPFL financial service colleagues our appreciation and to express to them our sincere gratitude, we organized an open doors day on Friday 13 June 2008. This was an occasion for us to not only show them some of our work, but also to have some face to face interactions with them, and enjoy some quality time together.
The pictures of the open doors day can be consulted at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/OpenDoors2008

CBMI-2008 and COST292 in London, UK

The 6th edition of the International Workshop on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI-2008) took place in London, UK, on 18-20 June 2008. It was hosted by Queen Mary University of London. This was a very interesting and informative event. I was one of the invited panelists there to discuss the future of research in multimedia retrieval.
I have put a copy of my slides in the mirror site of my Blog at EPFL, at the end of the same article, for those interested.
More information about CBMI-2008 and a detailed technical program on what was presented and discussed can be found at the following url:
http://cbmi08.qmul.net/

In parallel to CBMI-2008, the Technical Committees and Management Committee of the COST292 also met during the same period to present the latest progress of this Action, and to set up further coordinations. Additional information about COST292 Action can be obtained from the following URL:
http://www.cost292.org/
One of the most active Working Groups in COST292 is WG7/JPSearch which coordinates the activities of this Action towards standardization of image search technologies under the scope of the ISO JPEG committee. I have the pleasure of chairing this activity. Further information about WG7 is accessible in the following url (you need to become a member of COST292 in order to see all the details):
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/JPSearch-COST292/

One of the highlights of CBMI-2008 was a great dinner on board of a boat on Thames river. I took a few pictures of this social event and put the in the following url, together with some other pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/CBMI2008AndCOST292InLondonUK

NTNU Digital Cinema movie theater in Trondheim

I had a chance to visit the Digital Cinema movie theater in Trondheim thanks to Prof. Andrew Perkis, a friend and colleague since many years. This visit was most impressive. In fact, as far as I can say, there is no other place in the world I am aware of where a university has access to a movie theater with several hundred seats, and featuring the most advanced 4K digital cinema projector ever built. In this sense, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is ahead of everyone else, and deserves a big applause. Beside various research in very high quality audiovisual processing for entertainment, NTNU uses this facility also in medical imaging and telemedicine. Andrew and I, together with other faculties, post-docs and PhD students from NTNU have planned some fascinating research which makes use of this unique facility. I hope in near future, I will have an opportunity to report the results in my Blog.
I took a few pictures of my visit that you can consult at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/TrondheimDigitalCinema

Sixth MMSPL Lunch Meeting

The sixth MMSPL lunch meeting was also a first! Our first barbecue in 2008. This lunch was organized on June 2nd, 2008, by Marija Uscumlic. Despite summer around the corner, because of the danger of rain, the meeting took place indoor, while the cooking happened outdoors. Some pictures of the event are accessible at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SixthMMSPLLunchMeeting

Note: Picasa is experiencing problems with public access to albums (google starts having cracks appear in its quality....are we witnessing the beginning of the end?).
So, I moved the pictures to Flickr! If the problem persists, I will move all my past and future pictures to Flickr in the future as well. If the above link does not work, use the following:
http://flickr.com/photos/48356885@N00/sets/72157605507290993/detail/

Visnet-II General Meeting in Lisbon

The General Meeting of Visnet-II European Consortium took place from May 14-16, 2008 in Lisbon, Portugal. Visnet-II is the sequel of Visnet, and is a Network of Excellence in the domain of Networked Media within FP7 research program of the European Commission. The consortium has activities around three closely related themes: Video coding, Audiovisual Processing, and Security. Interestingly enough, these themes and the way the project is partitioned in topics is quite similar to the way MMSPL is organized in terms of research topics as well. But in Visnet-II we are involved mainly in video coding, and in video processing themes, which has already resulted into a significant amount of activities from EPFL in this consortium, as a dozen of my colleagues contribute to Visnet-II. Although a network of excellence is not supposed to create any prototype or carry out trials, Visnet-II integrates its research activities under the scope of two application platforms: Video surveillance and Virtual collaboration.
A detailed information about Visnet-II can be found at the following url:
http://www.visnet-noe.org
Visnet-II has regular newsletters published on a monthly basis, with very interesting and informative content. I strongly recommend that you consider subscribing to this newsletter. To do it, go to the above url and follow the link to NEWSLETTERS.
The Lisbon meeting was attended by two of Scientific Advisory Board members of Visnet-II: Prof. Susanne Boll from University of Oldenburg, and Prof. Klaus Diepold from Technical University of Munich, both from Germany. They made excellent recommendations after spending three days with us.
The Lisbon meeting was hosted by Fernando Pereira and his team from IST. As usual with all the events organized by them (I have already reported a couple in my blog: Discover Workshop and PCS in 2007), it was just outstanding.
You can consult some pictures of the event at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/VisnetIIGeneralMeetingInLisbon

84th MPEG meeting in Archamps, France organized by MMSPL

We hosted and organized the 84th MPEG meeting from April 26th to May 2nd 2008, in Archamps, France, at about 15 minutes of distance form downtown Geneva. This MPEG meeting was hosted by Switzerland just 9 months after a previous one in Summer 2007, which was also reported in this blog. See the following url for the report of that meeting, which took place at EPFL in Lausanne:
http://blogs.epfl.ch/touradj.ebrahimi/2007-10-31
More than 200 people attended the MPEG meeting in Archamps. Some information about this meeting can be consulted at the following url:
http://www.mpegswissmeeting.ch/qsPortal/Home.asp
A lot more about MPEG and its workplan can be found at the following url:
http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/
I have put some pictures of the meeting in Archamps at the following location:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MPEGmeetingArchamps2008
MPEG will return again to Switzerland for another meeting in about 9 months, also hosted and organized by us.

Fifth MMSPL Lunch Meeting

On May 5th, 2008, we had our research group's fifth lunch meeting. This time the lunch was organized by Shuiming Ye, who is a post-doc with us.
You can see some pictures of the lunch at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/FifthMMSPLLunchMeeting

Q2S 2008 Advisory Board Meeting

The Advisory Board of Q2S met with the members of the Center on 19 and 20 May 2008 at a beautiful place called Brekstad about one hour from Trondheim by speed boat. This was an opportunity to discuss the latest progress of Q2S with the scientific advisory board members, but also it was an occasion to enjoy the beauties of Norway.

Those interested in knowing more about Q2S can consult its annual reports of Q2S available from the following site:
http://www.q2s.ntnu.no/annrep.php

One of the highlights of this event was a sailing boat ride and fishing expedition after the first day meeting. This was a unique and exciting experience.
Some photos can be consulted at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/Q2S2008AdvisoryBoardMeeting

If you thought that Norway is about oil and salmon only, I recommend a visit to this beautiful country. You will be pleasantly surprized.
And by the way, did you know there are great opportunities for talented researchers and Ph.D. students at Q2S? If you want to know more, drop me an email.

MMSPL forth lunch meeting in 2008

We had our forth lunch meeting on 14th April 2008. This lunch was organized by Gelareh Mohammadi who actually cooked for us some good Iranian food. This lunch was also an opportunity to welcome our new colleague Ivan Ivanov who has joined our group as a research assistant and Ph.D. student.
Some pictures can be consulted at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPLForthLunchMeetingIn2008

MMSPL third lunch meeting in 2008

The third lunch meeting of Multimedia Signal Processing Group took place on Wednesday 12 March 2008. The lunch was organized by our colleague Lionel Rhyn. This was an occasion to welcome Yolanda Cobos Campos from VicomTECH, Spain, who was staying with us in the framework of a short time scientific mission financed by COST 292 Action. We also took this opportunity to say goodbye and wish good luck to now Dr. Ulrich Hoffmann who was leaving our research group at the end of March, upon successful completion of his Ph.D. thesis.
Some pictures of the lunch can be consulted at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPLThirdLunchMeeting

JPEG meeting in San Francisco

The 44th JPEG meeting took place in San Francisco from March 31st to April 4th. This was a very fruitful meeting with good progress in many ongoing activities. JPEG XR which is a new compression scheme in between JPEG and JPEG 2000 in terms of complexity but also performance, moved one step forward by becoming Committee Draft. JPSearch approved several Working Drafts for its various parts, and a new independent standard activity was initiated called JPEG DI which will standardize tools that go across all JPEG codecs (file format, security tools, interactivity tools, evaluation tools, etc.). Advanced Image Coding activities were also moved forward with agreement on a workplan and next steps towards a call for technologies for the next generation image coding standard.
One of the highlights of this meeting was the 3D digital cinema projection of Beowulf which was attended by the experts of JPEG at the kind invitation of Dolby Laboratories on their premises and projection room in San Francisco.

Some pictures I took during the meeting can be seen from:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/JPEGMeetingInSanFrancisco

Invited Presentation at Defense and Security Symposium 2008

Defense and Security Symposium (DSS) is an annual event gathering academics, engineers, and professionals in various areas of security and defense in Orlando, Florida. The symposium often takes place either during the Easter week, or next to it. This year DSS was from 16-20 March 2008. You can have a look at the program and various conferences organized during DSS by referring to the following url:

http://spie.org/x23834.xml

I have been attending DSS since three years now and usually teach a short course there on Information Processing for Video Surveillance together with my colleague Dr. Frédéric Dufaux. In 2008, we took a short break from giving this course at DSS (it was given instead during the Electronic Imaging in San Jose on January 2008, and will be given again on July 2008 during SPIE annual meeting in San Diego). Instead, I went there to make an invited presentation on JPSEC and JPWL standards during the conference on Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing, Security, and Applications 2008, which is one of the many conferences during DSS.

I often meet a colleague from MPEG, Pankaj Topiwala, during DSS. The picture below was taken this year with him. You can also consult the content of my invited presentation by going to the mirror of this blog at EPFL.

PetaMedia first kick-off workshop and adventures with Swiss airline

PetaMedia (Peer to Peer Tagged Media) is a Network of Excellence consortium funded by the European Commission in the area of integration between Social Networks, Peer to Peer networking, and Multimedia Content Analysis. More information about PetaMedia can be found at the following url:
http://www.petamedia.eu/

The kick-off meeting of the project took place in Delft, on March 13-14, 2008. I took a few pictures of the event and put them on the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/PetaMediaDelft
The kick-off meeting was very productive indicating that PetaMedia will be a successful project.

The trip to Delft was by itself some adventure and full of interesting lessons.
In case your Swiss airline flight happens to land too late at Zurich airport and you miss your continuation flight, which is helas becoming now a standard pattern in Swiss flights from Geneva, expect waiting up to one hour before anybody takes care of you if you don't have the privilege of access to first class counter. If you have the privilege to first class counter, the wait is only 30 minutes, but definitely avoid some lady called Mrs Gonzales. She misses the DNA code for politeness in her genes. Don't even think about complaining if after making you wait almost two hours and up to virtually mid-night, they tell you that as you will have to take the plane leaving the next morning at 6 am, you should take a bus ride for 40 minutes to some small village called Zurzach near the German border (http://www.planetware.com/switzerland/zurzach-ch-ag-zurz.htm), sleep in a room which is hardly big enough for putting a tiny bed in it, and you have to get up before 5 am, take another bus ride for 40 minutes to come back to Zurich airport. Of course, if the hotel staff forgets to wake you up at 4:30 am as you asked them to do just a few hours before, don't be surprized. They will tell you they are sorry! At least you discover that not all people from German part of Switzerland are like Mrs Gonzales! If you have time and can stand to be treated like a criminal, after harassing you enough, the Swissport personnel may eventually consider exchanging the bus ride for a taxi, but consider yourself specially honored and lucky if this happens. This is a unique privilege for only the best customers. I just wonder if the best customers are handled like this, how the less best customers are treated!

By the way, did I mention there are cheaper direct flight from Geneva to Amsterdam offered by other companies?

I won't be complete if I did not tell you a similar adventure that happened during the pre-kick off meeting of PetaMedia.

The pre-kick off meeting of PetaMedia took place in Queen Mary University of London on February 11th 2008. As this was a one day meeting, I took a Swiss flight from Geneva to London City airport (http://www.londoncityairport.com/) in the morning with the intention of returning on the same evening. Not surprizingly, the flight was delayed due to fog and bad weather and after much delay in take-off, and then a couple of hours in the air circling around most of the time, Swiss decided to finally land instead in a very remote airport called Stansted (http://www.stanstedairport.com/). This is of course the type of things that can happen, so one cannot really blame anyone for this at first sight. The real problem was that Swiss airline has absolutely nobody nor whatsoever in that airport, and they don't tell you anything about it. So, they land you at a hundred kilometer distance from where you are supposed to be landed, and you are on your own, in an unknown airport, and unknown place, trying to find out how to get where you are supposed to get to! Do you think you receive a letter of apology or any compensation? I let you guess. I can only wish that one day Lufthansa which fully owns Swiss, will decide to change the name of this company, so that at least with the type of services they offer, they do not damage the image of Switzerland by abusing its name!

Master Program in Security and Cryptology of Information Systems

Since 2002, I have been teaching a media security course in the framework of a Master program on information security, jointly run by INPG and University of Joseph Fourier, in Grenoble, France. As such, since 2002, I have been spending a couple of days per year in Grenoble to teach some 16 hours of lecture in an intensive two-day program.
In 2007-08, the program of this master went through a major revision, and was largely redesigned. One of the big changes has been the language of teaching which is now English, because the program is being attended by non-French speaking students from as far as Emirates.
For those who are interested in knowing more about this Master program on Security and Cryptology of Information Systems, I have put the a brochure of the program in pdf on the mirror of this blog at my EPFL blog site.
This year, my lectures were planned on 6-7 March 2008, and included as usual two full days of lectures followed by a one hour test.
I have put a few pictures taken during my visit to Grenoble at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/GrenobleMasterProgramOnInformationSecurity

Adjunct professor at NTNU

EPFL allows its faculty members to dispose of 20% of their time for carrying out any free activities they believe is interesting for them. I recently found a way to make a good use of this possibility! As of March 2008, I have been appointed as an adjunct professor at the Center of Excellence for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems (Q2S) of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Trondheim, Norway.
This opportunity came out of previous discussions with my good friend Andrew Perkis, who is a full professor at NTNU and very involved in Q2S. Andrew and I have been knowing each other since almost 15 years now, and have been working together in a number of exciting projets in the past. I am happy that this opportunity will allow us to continue with an even stronger collaboration from now on.
Information about NTNU can be found at the following url:
http://www.ntnu.no
There is also a lot of information about Q2S at the following link:
http://www.q2s.ntnu.no
I went to Norway for my first visit of Q2S, from March 2-5. The timing was very fortunate because it not only coincided with the visit of Andrew to Trondheim (he is on leave in Singapore for a while), but also I was lucky to meet two other colleagues and friends: Fernando Pereira, professor at IST in Portugal, and Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu, professor at ENST in Paris, who also were there as members of Jury of the PhD thesis of Stian Johansen. Stian defended his thesis with success. Congratulations to him!
Above all, this visit was an opportunity for me to get to know PhD students, Post-docs and Researchers at Q2S in a first contact, and to have a face to face discussion with some of them, and to plan some concrete activities. I am sure in the near future you will see some other articles in this blog about Q2S and NTNU.
I took a few pictures while in Trondheim. Have a look:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/Q2S

COST292 WG7 (JPSearch) meeting in Florence

The COST292 is a European research cooperation project entitled Semantic Multimodal Analysis of Digital Media. Some useful information about this consortium can be found here:
http://www.cost292.org
Working Group 7 of this project is involved in JPSearch and I have the pleasure of chairing it.
WG7 had its meeting in the beautiful city of Florence on February 28th, 2008. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the outcome of the lastest JPsearch meeting in November 2007, and to prepare contributions and coordinate among the members of COST292 for the next JPSearch meeting in April 2008. Information about WG7 and its activities can be obtained from its website at the following url:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/JPSearch-COST292
The above link is password protected for most parts, but you can ask to have access to it, if you become a member of COST 292.
The meeting in Florence was hosted by Alinari at the National Museum of Photography which is really worth visiting if you happen to be in Florence. The museum is very close to the main train station of Florence called Santa Maria Novella (see: http://www.mnaf.it/eng/index.html).
The meeting was both very successful and enjoyable, and was an occasion to meet some good old friends.
Some photos of the meeting can be found at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/COST292Florence2008

MMSPL Second Lunch meeting in 2008

MMSPL had its second lunch meeting in 2008 on February 20th. This lunch was organized by Mourad Ouaret, the most senior Ph.D. student in our team. The food was fantastic, and I think everybody enjoyed it. I could join only for the last part of the lunch, as it had collided with our Institute's faculty meeting.
Some pictures can be seen at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPLSecondLunchMeeting

JPEG AhG meeting in Poitiers, France

JPEG members involved in the development of JPEG-XR and the evaluation criteria of AIC had a meeting in Poitiers, France, on February 14 and 15, 2008. This meeting was attended by experts from USA, Japan, and Europe. From EPFL, four attended. Michael Ansorge, Frederic Dufaux, Francesca De Simone, and myself. This was a very successful and rich meeting, with participants giving the latest conclusions of their evaluation of JPEG-XR as compared to other image compression standards such as JPEG and JPEG 2000. EPFL team had worked very hard on this evaluation for weeks. Our results required some 2.5 Tera bytes of disk space, and produced around 4000 comparison graphics.
Beside the meeting in Poitiers which was very successful, this trip was also very rich from other perpectives. I learned that on the evening of February 14th (St Valentine), there is almost no hope to find a restaurant in Poitiers. That in the Parisian metro, one can meet people who could become agressive if you don't give them some money. That Japanese are still among the most civilized people left on this planet. And that if some selfish French woman orders you to carry her heavy bag for her, without even saying 'please', you better do it immediately, if you don't want her to insult you!

Some pictures of the trip can be found in the following site:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/JPEGAhGMeetingInPoitiersFrance

2008 MMSPL first lunch meeting

The first lunch meeting of our research team in 2008 took place on Tuesday February 5th. The lunch was organized by Francesca De Simone, who actually cooked some great Italian food for us, and took the pain of bringing it all to our Laboratory's premises. I would like to extend on behalf of all those who participated in this lunch meeting, a big thanks to Francesca for the wonderful meals. We are all looking forward to the second lunch meeting in a few weeks!

Some pictures of the first lunch meeting in 2008 can be consulted at the following url:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPL2008FirstLunchMeeting

DISCOVER project successful completion

The DISCOVER project is a European Commission funded, Future and Emerging Technologies research project. DISCOVER was one of our major research projects since September 2005, and has been allowing us to carry on exciting research in the emerging field of distributed video coding, and to interact with 5 other top research groups in Europe active in this field.
The partners of DISCOVER project are UPC (Spain), IST (Portugal), INRIA (France), University of Hannover (Germany), University of Brescia (Italy), and of course EPFL (Switzerland). I believe that without any doubt, one can say that DISCOVER has been the main research project in the field of distributed video coding in Europe, and among the most visible efforts in this field worldwide.
A look at the project website in the following url shows the amount of activities and achievements of this project:
http://www.discoverdvc.org/

Officially, DISCOVER project completed its activities in November 2007, by organizing an international workshop in Lisbon Portugal, about which I have already reported in one of my previous articles in this blog.
However, January 9th, 2008 was the last time project members had a chance to meet together, and with the reviewers of the project, as well as the European Commission representative, to deliver the report of its activities. This meeting took place in Lausanne, and was hosted by our research team. The photo below commemorates the last meeting of DISCOVER. In the picture you see from left to right, Prof. Joern Ostermann from University of Hannover, Prof. Fernando Pereira from IST, Dr. Christine Guillemot from INRIA, Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi from EPFL, Prof. Riccardo Leonardi from University of Brescia, and Prof. Luis Torres from UPC, all the main coordinators of the project partners.

Welcome to my blog

Hi,
This is basically an external mirror to my EPFL blog accessible from: http://blogs.epfl.ch/Touradj.Ebrahimi/
You can of course consult the articles from the above url as well.