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:
