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