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