Panel Discussions

Jerry D. Gibson is Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1996, and he has served on the Board of Governors of the IT Society and the Communications Society. He was a member of the Speech Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society from 1992-1994, and he is currently a member of the Multimedia Communications Technical Committee of the Communications Society. He was an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2007-2008, and he is a member of the IEEE Awards Committee and the IEEE Medal of Honor Committee. He is an IEEE Fellow, and he has received The Fredrick Emmons Terman Award (1990), the 1993 IEEE Signal Processing Society Senior Paper Award, the 2009 IEEE Technical Committee on Wireless Communications Recognition Award, and the 2010 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

Schuyler Quackenbush is an expert in digital audio technology. He was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Laboratories, and before that Bell Laboratories. He is active in the area of standardization of audio coding algorithms, and is currently the chair of the International Standards Organization Motion Picture Experts Group (ISO/MPEG) Audio subgroup, and was one of the authors of the ISO/IEC MPEG Advanced Audio Coding standard. His areas of expertise are in audio and speech coding algorithms, audio error mitigation algorithms, multi-channel audio recording, compression, and playback, and real-time signal processing algorithms and hardware. He is the author of more than 30 publications in these areas, including one book, Objective Measures of Speech Quality.

Dr. Quackenbush received his B.S. degree from Princeton University in 1975. After four years in industry as a design engineer, he entered Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1980, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1985. For the latter half of 1985, he was a staff research associate at Georgia Tech. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1986 as Member of Technical Staff, where he was in the Digital Signal Processing Research department, and in 1996 he joined AT&T Laboratories as Principal Technical Staff Member, where he was in the Speech and Audio Research Department. In 2002 he founded Audio Research Labs, an audio technology consulting company. He is a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Thomas Wiegand is a professor at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Berlin Institute of Technology, chairing the Image Communication Laboratory, and is jointly heading the Image Processing department of the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications - Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1995 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, in 2000. He joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute in 2000 as the head of the Image Communication group in the Image Processing department. His research interests include video processing and coding, multimedia transmission, as well as computer vision and graphics.

From 1993 to 1994, he was a Visiting Researcher at Kobe University, Japan. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. From 1997 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, USA and served as a consultant to 8x8, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA. From 2006-2008, he was a consultant to Stream Processors, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA. From 2007-2009, he was a consultant to Skyfire, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA. Since 2006, he has been a member of the technical advisory board of Vidyo, Inc., Hackensack, NJ, USA.

Since 1995, he has been an active participant in standardization for multimedia with successful submissions to ITU-T VCEG, ISO/IEC MPEG, 3GPP, DVB, and IETF. In October 2000, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. In December 2001, he was appointed as the Associated Rapporteur / Co-Chair of the JVT. In February 2002, he was appointed as the Editor of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard and its extensions (FRExt and SVC). From 2005-2009, he was Co-Chair of MPEG Video.

In 1998, he received the SPIE VCIP Best Student Paper Award. In 2004, he received the Fraunhofer Award and the ITG Award of the German Society for Information Technology. The projects that he co-chaired for development of the H.264/AVC standard have been recognized by the 2008 ATAS Primetime Emmy Engineering Award and a pair of NATAS Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. In 2009, he received the Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation, the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award, and the Best Paper Award of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology. In 2010, he received the Eduard Rhein Technology Award. He was a Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology for its Special Issue on the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard in July 2003 and its Special Issue on Scalable Video Coding—Standardization and Beyond in September 2007. Since January 2006, he has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

Touradj Ebrahimi received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics. He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is also the head of the Swiss delegation to MPEG, JPEG and SC29, and acts as the Chairman of Advisory Group on Management in SC29. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection. He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface).

He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T.

As a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC), Natasa Milic-Frayling is setting research directions for the Integrated Systems group (http://research.microsoft.com/is), a cross-disciplinary team focused on the design, prototyping and evaluation of information and communication systems and services. In her research, Natasa fosters collaboration across academic areas and considers multiple perspectives of the research problems. During her tenure at Microsoft Research she also served as Director of Research Partnership with industry and promoted collaboration between MS Research and industry leading partners and clients.

Natasa received her Doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA in 1988. Prior to joining Microsoft Research in 1998, she served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Scence at Seton Hill College and, subsequently, Director of Research at the Claritech Corporation, a spin-off company from Carnegie-Mellon University focussing on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

Natasa is actively involved with a wider community, promoting research and innovation through public speaking and research engagements. Her publication record reflects the cross-disciplinary nature of her research, covering topics from machine learning and information retrieval models to the user experience in mobile and social media enviroments. Her latest contribution is the book chapter on the social networks analysis of Flickr social media in "Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL" by Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman, and Marc Smith, released in Sept 2010 by Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.

Nuria Oliver is currently the Scientific Director for the Multimedia and Data Mining & User Modeling Research Teams in Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). She eceived the BSc (honors) and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the ETSIT at the Universidad Politecnica of Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 1992 and 1994 respectively. She received her PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, in June 2000. From July 2000 until November 2007, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. At the end of 2007, she returned to Spain to create and lead the Multimedia Scientific Team at Telefonica Research in Barcelona. Since March 2009, she is also the acting Scientific Director for the Data Mining & User Modeling Team in Telefonica Research. It is an exciting opportunity to do research in her own country.

Her research interests include mobile computing, multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval, smart environments, context awareness, statistical machine learning and data mining, artificial intelligence, health monitoring, social network analysis, computational social sciencies, and human computer interaction. She is currently working on the previous disciplines to build human-centric intelligent systems.

Nuria has written over 60 papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters. Her work has been widely recognized by the scientific community with over 3100 citations. Nuria has over 30 patent applications and granted patents. She is also in the program committee and a reviewer of the top conferences in her research areas (IJCAI, IUI, UMAP, ACM Multimedia, ICMI-MLMI, Interaccion, PervasiveHealth, MIR, LoCA, MMM, CVPR, Ubicomp, MobileHCI, ICCV, AAAI, etc...). She was program co-chair of IUI 2009 and of MIR 2010. She is general conference co-chair of UMAP 2011, industry-day co-chair of IJCAI 2011.

She believes in the power of technology to empower and increase the quality of life of people. She has received a number of awards, including MIT’s ‘TR100 Young Innovators Award’ (2004) and the First Spanish Award of EECS graduates (1994). Besides her scientific publications, she is very interested in making science available to the general public. She has been a technology writer for Tecno2000 magazine and ‘El Pais’ newspapers, among others. Her work has been featured on multiple newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations both in Spain and the US. She has been named one of the '100 leaders of the future ' by Capital Magazine (May 2009) and one of the 'Generation XXI: 40 Spanish youngsters that will make news in the Third Millenium ' by EL PAIS (2000).

Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research where he manages the Social Media Engagement group and is the technical lead of the large-scale Spanish project CENIT Social Media, which consists of an industry consortium of 7 members. Dr. Jaimes is General Chair for ACM Multimedia 2013, he is the founder of the ACM Multimedia Interactive Art program, Industry Track chair for ACM RecSys 2010 and UMAP 2009, and panels chair for KDD 2009. He was program co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2008, co-editor of the IEEE Trans. on Multimedia Special issue on Integration of Context and Content for Multimedia Management (2008), and a founding member of the IEEE CS Task-force on Human-Centered Computing. His work has led to over 70 technical publications in international conferences and journals, and to numerous contributions to MPEG-7. He has been granted several patents, and serves in the program committee of several international conferences. He has been an invited speaker at CIME 2011 (panel on Social Media), Practitioner Web Analytics 2010, CIVR 2010, ECML-PKDD 2010 and KDD 2009 and (Industry tracks), ACM Recommender Systems 2008 (panel), DAGM 2008 (keynote), 2007 ICCV Workshop on HCI, and several others. Before joining Yahoo! Dr. Jaimes was a visiting professor at U. Carlos III in Madrid and founded and managed the User Modelling and Data Mining group at Telefonica Research. Prior to that Dr. Jaimes was Scientific Manager at IDIAP-EPFL (Switzerland), and was previously at Fuji Xerox (Japan), IBM TJ Watson (USA), IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (Japan), Siemens Corporate Research (USA), and AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA). Dr. Jaimes received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (2003) and a M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia U. (1997) in NYC.

Touradj Ebrahimi received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding. He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics. He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is also the head of the Swiss delegation to MPEG, JPEG and SC29, and acts as the Chairman of Advisory Group on Management in SC29. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection. He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface).

He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T.

Remco Veltkamp is full professor of Computer Science at Utrecht University. He leads the group on Multimedia & Geometry. His research interests include 3D object recognition and retrieval, construction of virtual worlds, 3D interaction, and music and image retrieval. He has written over 150 refereed papers in reviewed journals and conferences, and supervised 15 PhD theses. He is editor of the international journals Pattern Recognition, Graphical Modeling, and the International Journal on Shape Modeling. He organized several Dagstuhl Seminars on Content-Based Retrieval, is member of the steering committee of the Shape Modeling International conference, program chair of ISMIR2010 and 3DOR2010, and was PC member of 45 conferences.

Maja Pantic received the M.S. and PhD degrees in computer science from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 1997 and 2001. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Computing Dept., UK, where she is Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and the leader of the iBUG group, working on machine analysis of human behaviour. From November 2006,she also holds a Professor appointment at the University of Twente, Computer Science Dept., the Netherlands.

In 2002, for her research on Facial Information for Advanced Interface (FIFAI), she received Innovational Research Award of Dutch Research Council as one of the 7 best young scientists in exact sciences in the Netherlands. In 2007, for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behavior (MAHNOB), she received European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG) as one of 3% best junior scientists in any research field in Europe. She is also a partner in several FP7 European projects.

She is the Editor in Chief of the Image and Vision Computing Journal, Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B: Cybernetics (IEEE TSMC-B), and member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. She is the member of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Board of Governers.

Maja Pantic published more than 100 technical papers in the areas of machine analysis of facial expressions and emotions, machine analysis of human body gestures, and human-centered HCI. She has more than 2500 citations to her work, and has served as the Key Note Speaker, Chair and Co-Chair, and an organization/ program committee member at numerous conferences in her areas of expertise.

Mohamed Daoudi is a Full Professor of Computer Science in the Institut TELECOM ; TELECOM Lille 1, LIFL (UMR 8022). He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Lille 1 (USTL), France, in 1993 and Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from the University of Littoral, France, in 2000. He was the founder of the MIIRE research group of LIFL (UMR 8022). His research interests include pattern recognition, image processing, three-dimensional analysis and retrieval and more recently 3D face recognition.

He has published more than 80 papers in refereed journals and proceedings of international conferences. He is the coauthor of the book "3D processing : Compression, Indexing and Watermarking (Wiley, 2008)".

He has served as a Program Commitee member for the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) in 2004 and the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) in 2004 and 2005. He was a co-organizer and co-chair of ACM Workkshop on 3D Retrieval 2010 and Eurographics 3D Object retrieval 2009. He has organized a special session on 3D Face Analysis and Recognition at ICME 2008.He was an associate editor of the Journal of Multimedia (2006-2009).

He is a frequent reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and for IJCV, JMIV. His research has been funded by ANR, RNRT and European Commission grants. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Zhengyou Zhang received the B.S. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Zhejiang, Hangzhou, China, in 1985, the M.S. degree in computer science from the University of Nancy, Nancy, France, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science and the Doctorate of Science (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) from the University of Paris XI, Paris, France, in 1990 and 1994, respectively.

He is a Principal Researcher with Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA, and manages the multimodal collaboration research team. Before joining Microsoft Research in March 1998, he was with INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control), France, for 11 years and was a Senior Research Scientist from 1991. In 1996-1997, he spent a one-year sabbatical as an Invited Researcher with the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan. He has published over 200 papers in refereed international journals and conferences, and has coauthored the following books: 3-D Dynamic Scene Analysis: A Stereo Based Approach (Springer-Verlag, 1992); Epipolar Geometry in Stereo, Motion and Object Recognition (Kluwer, 1996); Computer Vision (Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1998, 2003, in Chinese); Face Detection and Adaptation (Morgan and Claypool, 2010), and Face Geometry and Appearance Modeling (Cambridge University Press, 2010, to appear). He has given a number of keynotes in international conferences.

Dr. Zhang is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision, and an Associate Editor of Machine Vision and Applications. He served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence from 2000 to 2004, an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia from 2004 to 2009, among others. He has been on the program committees for numerous international conferences in the areas of autonomous mental development, computer vision, signal processing, multimedia, and human-computer interaction. He served as a Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), July 2010, a Program Co-Chair of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), October 2010, and a Program Co-Chair of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI), November 2010.