Resistance is futile! Become part of the Borg collective.

Privacy is one of those things intimately linked to individualism, and one of the fundamental needs of any human being. Obviously, the definition of privacy and its degree, or even its importance, largely depends on ones personality, age, and culture, among others. Recently, with the proliferation of video surveillance systems across cities, issues such solutions created for the privacy of individuals have been raised, and are among hot topics in discussions and debates around video surveillance. Other new information and communication technologies are also bringing their share of invasion of privacy. Recently, The Swiss Federal Commissioner for Data Protection announced they are taking Google to court because of the invasion of privacy that Street View represents. Likewise, serious privacy issues have been identified in Facebook, Youtube, Flicker, and many other social networking services. In fact, it seems that some of today’s services and products, and many more in future, in order to be good and efficient, will need to invade our privacy! Or this is at least what some pretend. Because of the undeniable added value of many of such products and services, some advocate that we should revisit our perception about privacy and live with the fact that it will be increasingly difficult to maintain privacy as we used to. In other words, we will have to trade our privacy for more features and functionalities, and often, we won’t be given even the choice. Interestingly, a non-negligible portion of scientific community and opinion leaders seem to agree! Well...I don’t. After scarifying QUALITY to get cheap goods, here comes loosing our PRIVACY to get goods. Living in a country which is build around the concepts of quality and privacy, I beg to differ! First of all, technology can be used to reduce, if not to eliminate the dilemma of making a choice between privacy and additional features. It is possible to have the best of the both, if an effort is made to do it. Second, and more importantly, this road will take us to a society where individuals will increasingly disappear in the collective. Trading privacy for services will lead into sharing all thoughts, and inevitably, some other individual values such as ownership. Do you know what a society deprived of privacy, ownership and other individual values is called: THE BORG COLLECTIVE!
Are you ready for assimilation?

This is a mirrored version of my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch

Visit my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch

I used to be quite a regular blogger for more than two years. I started my first blog on October 20th 2007 (see http://blogs.epfl.ch/touradj.ebrahimi/2007-10-20), and shortly after, on February 2nd, 2008, mirrored it on http://touradjebrahimi.blogspot.com/. Since joining facebook, which takes a good portion of the time I had put aside for my presence on blogosphere, the frequency of my blogs have reduced from once a week to once every 4 months! In fact, my last blog dates back to July 25th, 2009. I have decided to again give it a try and attempt to maintain a blog. This time, I am using Apple’s iWeb and MobileMe which seems to have an efficient user interface, hoping this would save me time, and will allow me to do both my blogging and facebooking in the same length of time I have devoted to such activities. A novelty for this new blog will be that as opposed to my past two blogs (which will continue to mirror this one for a while), I won’t only discuss my work related issues, but also extend to a much wider range of issues. Let’s see how it will go ...

This is a mirrored version of my new blog on http://www.ebrahimi.ch

QoMEX 2009 is ready to go

It has been quite some time since my last blog. There are many reasons behind this. One is social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I increasingly use these tools to communicate with my colleagues, friends, and all persons with whom I share similar interests. Of course these social networks do not completely replace the need for a blog, but definitely they answer to some of the needs which make people write blogs. And they have features that a blog cannot offer. Obviously, like many others the time I can devote to such activities is limited, and doing one thing more will necessarily leaves less time for something else. But I have not completely given up on blogging and you will see more blogs coming from me, at a slower frequency, but for sure on regular basis.

One other reason which has prevented me to write more blogs is QoMEX 2009. This is a workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience that we founded about a year ago. The preparation of the workshop took a lot of hard work for everybody. I am glad to say that all is now ready for this event to take place next week! We already have nearly 100 confirmed participants, and an exciting program has been put in place. I will certainly write at least one more blog about QoMEX 2009 after it has happened. However, this may take some time. If like me, you are also a member of Fracebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, go to QoMEX 2009 website at http://www.qomex.org and from there find the links to QoMEX at your favorite social network. I strongly recommend that you register to more than only one of these links as each bring a complementary information. For example, Facebook QoMEX contains pictures, video, information, and opinion of participants. Twitter will be used more during the event to allow people to give on the fly their impressions, to send news around about events, papers, sessions, etc., and to share some real-time pictures, and more. LinkedIn is more for discussions before and after the event. Of course somethings can be done in all three. In additon to these, we have also created a presence for QoMEX 2009 on YouTube and DailyMotion with some interesting video already uploaded there. We have planned to record various sessions and presentations at QoMEX 2009 for those speakers who will allow us to do it, and defnitely some of those will find its way on these forums. We are working on a solution to put all the recordings on a site to allow those who could not attend QoMEX 2009 to access them freely, together with the slides of the presentations.

One of the secrets behind the success of social networks is that they live only if the community they are created for becomes active in them. So, please do not hesitate to becomes active in all the above social networks if you have an interest in multimedia and quality of experience. You can use QoMEX presence on these social networks to present yourself and your interests and activities, talk about problems you may have encountered, seek answers for them or present the solutions you may have found that resolve these problems, upload graphics, pictures or video of you or your work, and in short become a member of the community of experts in multimedia and quality of experience.

To end this blog, let me share with you some highlights of QoMEX 2009:

QoMEX’09 features oral presentations, exhibits, panels and poster sessions in order to provide attendees with various channels to exchange and acquire information about the latest developments and future trends in the field of multimedia user experience.

Highlights from the Technical Program:

Plenary Talks

“Innovating the Multimedia Experience”

Speaker: Mr. Dave Blakely, Senior Director, IDEO

“Haptic Design Guidelines and Tools for the Next Generation of User Experience”

Speaker: Dr. Christophe Ramstein, Chief Technology Officer, Immersion Corporation

“Light is a Two-Way Street: The Next 50 Years of Video”

Speaker: Dr. Bruce Flinchbaugh, Texas Instruments Fellow and Director of the Video & Image Processing Laboratory, TI, Dallas

“Comparison of Subjective Assessment Protocols for Digital Cinema Applications”

Speaker: Prof. Christine Fernandez-Maloigne, Professor of Signal and Image Processing in Poitiers University, France

More details about the talks:

http://www.qomex2009.org/PlenaryTalks.asp

Panel on “Quality of Experience: Tools, Targets and Trends”

Panel Chair: Prof. Fernando Pereira, Prof. ECE, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal

Panelists:

Prof. Alan Bovik, Prof. and Chair, ECE, UT Austin

Dr. Gary Sulivan, Video Architect, Microsoft and Chairman, ITU/VCEG

Prof. Sebastian Moeller, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Berlin University of Technology

Dr. Stephen Winkler, Principal Technologist, Symmetricom

More details about the panel

http://www.qomex2009.org/Panel.asp

Technical papers will address the following major areas:

• User Experience Assessment and Enhancement

• Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics)

• Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio)

• Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation

See here for the list of papers

http://www.qomex2009.org/TechnicalProgram.asp

Registration

To register for the workshop please use this link

https://www.securecms.com/QOMEX2009/Registration.asp

A PDF version of the program guide and further information is available at:

http://www.qomex.org

Defense, Security and Sensing 2009

DSS 2009 took place between 13 and 17 April 2009 in Orlando, FL. More information about the event and its various conferences are available at:

http://spie.org/x34810.xml

I had two talks at DSS 2009 this year, both at the Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing, Security, and Applications conference. My first talk was on Next Generation Image Coding Standards: JPEG XR and AIC, was an invited talk. The second was entitled: Multi-view Video Segmentation and Tracking for Video Surveillance.

You can consult the slides of the invited talk below. As the link is sometimes too slow, an alternative way to see these slides would be to go directly to my LinkedIn profile to see these and some other slides I have put there.

At DSS 2009, like in its previous year edition, I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Pankaj Topiwala who is an old timer and very active contributor to DSS. Here, a picture of us.

JPEG XR AhG meeting in Tokyo, Japan, February 2009

PDF presentation of Dr. Gary Sullivan:

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/e/eb/ebrahimi/www/JPEGXR-TOKYO/Gary.pdf

PDF presentation of Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi:

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/e/eb/ebrahimi/www/JPEGXR-TOKYO/Touradj.pdf

87th MPEG meeting at EPFL in February 2009

The 87th MPEG meeting took place at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, from February 1st to 6th, 2009. This was the 7th time MPEG committee was coming to Switzerland at the invitation of the Swiss National Body to ISO, and the third time the committee came to EPFL. This meeting was very productive with many exciting developments. Among others, one can mention activities around 3D video coding, and the newly launched High Performance Video Coding, referred to as HVC, which aims at creating the next generation video compression algorithms beyond Advanced Video Compression AVC (also known as MPEG-4 part 10 and H.264). Another highlight of the meeting was the announcement that MPEG committee has received two Emmy Awards thanks to its outstanding contributions with AVC.

Some pictures of the meeting can be consulted at the following URL:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SwissMPEG2009?feat=directlink

VPQM2009

The forth edition of international workshop on video processing and quality metrics for consumer electronics (VPQM) took place in Scottsdale, Arizona, on January 15 and 16, 2009. This event has now become a traditional gathering place for experts from around the world active in the field of video quality assessment. More details about the forth edition, and previous workshops, together with program and papers presented are available at the following url:

http://enpub.fulton.asu.edu/resp/vpqm/

During this workshop I presented a work we did jointly with FUB on the influence of color information in the perception of quality in high resolution pictures. The pdf version of the paper can be accessed at the end of this article on its EPFL mirror.

I took a few pictures while at VPQM, that you can consult here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/VPQM2009?feat=directlink

It is worth mentionning that I am organizing a workshop related to this topic in San Diego from July 29-31st, 2009, called QoMEX.

Have a look at the following url and consider submitting a contribution:

http://www.qomex.org