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