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.