The now traditional MMSPG 2008 Christmas dinner took place on Saturday December 13th, 2008, at the usual place: Relais de la Poste, a nice restaurant on the easterns hights of Lausanne, in the middle of vineyards. This was a joyful and friendly gathering to meet with colleagues and their family members, and to celebrate a rather dynamic year 2008. Some photos of the dinner can be found at the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/MMSPG2008ChristmasDinner?feat=directlink
The 9th, and probably last lunch meeting of our research group in 2008, took place on November 7th. This lunch was organized by Jong-Seok LEE. Thanks to his wife's kind efforts and contributions, we could all enjoy some interesting and very tasty Korean food and drinks. Our appreciations go to both of them, and we look forward to have another similar experience very soon.
There are some pictures in the following URL of the event, and especially a few snapshots of some of the food we had:
picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/9thMMSPGLunchMeetingIn2008#
The Eighth lunch meeting in 2008, and the first after the summer break, took place on 22nd September 2008. This lunch was organized by Daniele Ticca one week before he ends his stay with us. Unsurprizingly, on he menu, we had Pizza! We wish Daniele good luck in his future career and will always remember his stay and the good memories he left with us.
Some photos of the lunch are available at:
picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/EighthMMSPLLunchMeeting#
K-space is an EC funded Network of Excellence on Knowledge Space of Semantic Inference for Automatic Annotation and Retrieval of Multimedia Content. This consortium has been running since January 2006 and is currently in its third and last year of conducting business. More information about K-space can be found at the following website: http://www.k-space.eu/
On September 22 and 23, 2008, the General Meeting of K-space was organized by my research team at EPFL, where more than 40 attended. A few pictures of the event can be found at the following site:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/KSpaceMeetingInLausanne#
Petamedia Special Interest Group 1 (SIG1) on content distribution took place at EPFL on Friday September 19th, 2008. Petamedia is a network of excellence funded by the European Commission on Peer to Peer Tagged Media. I have already written other articles about this NoE on this blog, and refer interested readers to those articles. Let me just say that more information about this NoE can be found at the following url:
The main objective of SIG1 was to have an indepth understanding of acticvities of all groups involved in content distribution related topics, and to define a detailed program to collaborate with each other.
I believe this goal was achieved with success and a mini-project was defined between most of the partners present to work together on the problem of video streaming over a peer to peer network. Other achievements of the meeting were organization of a tutorial for all partners to better understand issues and trends in peer to peer networks, and to define a longer term road map to explore avenues beyond the mini-project that has been set up.
A few pictures of the meeting are available at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/PetamediaSIG1meetingEPFL#
IM2 and Affective Sciences Summer Institute took place in Riederalp from 1-3 September 2008. IM2 is a Swiss National Center of Competence on Research in the field of Interactive Multimodal Information Management. I have been the deputy director of IM2 since 2006. Affective Sciences is another Swiss National Center of Competence on Reseach interested in understanding how emotions affect the way individuals and societies behave. Riederalp is a village in Valais Canton of Switzerland not very far from the world famous Aletsch glacier. This summer institute was organized to explore common interests between these two NCCRs and to set the ground for stronger collaborations between groups and individuals involved in each. To do so, after a short presentation of each NCCR, a GEKO (Get to Know each Other) session was organized followed by parallel sessions with presentations and workshops around themes of common interest. Finally a poster session was an opportunity for many of the researchers to present their research activities in more details. I acted at the moderator of the GEKO, and three of my research team members attended this summer institute (Francesca de Simone, Jong-Seok Lee, and Ashkan Yazdani). The program of the summer institute, and the slides of the presentations are accessible from the following url:
http://www.im2.ch/summer-institute-2008
In the above site you will also find a lot of pictures. But I also took some of mine, that can be seen at the following link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/IM2AffectiveScienceSummerInstitute2008#
The annual SPIE meeting Optics and Photonics took place from 10-14 August 2008 in San Diego. Optics and Photonics is a huge symposium composed of several conferences. The conference Appications of Digital Image Processing is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) conferences in image processing. It has been founded and is chaired by Andy Tescher a well-known researcher in the field. This year, Andy asked me to be the acting chair of the conference due to some other committments he had. The conference was very intresting with a lot of first time presentations in some of the most recent advances in image processing. Among others I would like to mention JPEG-XR which is a new standard for image compression. I took a few pictures during the conference that can be consulted from the following url:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Touradj.Ebrahimi/SPIEOpticsAndPhotonics2008#
The link to Optics and Photonics 2008 program is somehow unavailable at the time of the writing of this article. But the best way to find out about the program would be to go to SPIE website at http://www.spie.org and then look for past conferences. I may update this article with the exact url, if SPIE updates its website at some point in future.
