Invited Speakers

In this talk, we will present an innovative broadcast pyramid server architecture, referred to as IP Simulcast, which is very efficient for video broadcasting. We will also discuss a real-time compression algorithm, called XYZ codec, which can be inexpensively implemented in VLSI. This new algorithm provides a high compression ratio and high quality needed for video transmission on the Internet.

Biography.
Borko Furht is a professor of computer science and engineering at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. He is the founder and director of the Multimedia Laboratory at FAU, funded by National Science Foundation. Before joining FAU, he was a vice president of research and a senior director of development at Modcomp, a computer company of Daimler Benz, Germany, and a professor at University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. His current research is in multimedia systems and Internet, video compression, video indexing and retrieval, and interactive TV systems. He received research grants from national agencies such as NSF and NASA, and from industrial corporations such as IBM, General Electric, Xerox, Datacom, and Modcomp. Dr. Furht is a founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Kluwer Academic Publishers). He has initiated the graduate program on multimedia and Internet at FAU, and has presented tutorials, seminars, invited lectures, and keynote addresses at various IEEE and ACM conferences. He has received several technical and publishing awards, and has consulted for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, General Electric, JPL, NASA, Honeywell, CyLex, and RCA.

Biography.
Tsuhan Chen helped create the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing as the founding chair, and the Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop, both within the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His endeavor later evolved into the founding of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, both joining the efforts of multiple IEEE societies. He has recently been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia for 2002-2004.

Since October 1997, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as an Associate Professor. He directs the Advanced Multimedia Processing Laboratory, striving to turn multimedia technologies from science fiction into reality. His research interests include multimedia signal processing and communication, audio-visual interaction, biometrics, processing of 3D graphics, and building virtual worlds. From August 1993 to October 1997, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, now known as AT&T Labs-Research, as a principle technical staff member. He co-edited a book titled Advances in Multimedia: Systems, Standards, and Networks.

Tsuhan received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He received the Charles Wilts Prize for outstanding independent research in Electrical Engineering leading to a Ph.D. degree at the California Institute of Technology. His dissertation was on "multi"-dimensional "multi"-rate signal processing.

Over the last decade or so, wavelets have had a growing impact on signal processing theory and practice, both because of their unifying role and their successes in applications. Filter banks, which lie at the heart of wavelet-based algorithms, have become standard signal processing operators, used routinely in applications ranging from compression to modems. The contributions of wavelets have often been in the subtle interplay between discrete-time and continuous-time signal processing.

In particular, approximation properties of wavelets and their interplay with compression have lead to new insights, both in approximation theory and in practical compression systems. While wavelets are very good at treating one-dimensional piecewise smooth processes, they fail for two-dimensional objects with curve discontinuities. Thus, a lot of work remains to be done to achieve 'true' two-dimensional approximation and compression.

In this talk, we will review the progress so far, as well as outline some of the on-going work and point to open question. In some sense, we will try to answer the question 'is there life after JPEG2000?!'

Biography.
Martin Vetterli got his Engineering degree from Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich (ETHZ), his MS from Stanford University and his Doctorate from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). He was on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, and the University of California at Berkeley before joining the Communication Systems Dept. of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He works on signal processing and communications, in particular, wavelet theory and applications, image and video compression, joint source-channel coding, and self-organized communication systems. His work won him several prizes (best paper awards from EURASIP in 1984 and of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1991 and 1996) and he is the co-author, with J.Kovacevic, of the textbook 'Wavelets and Subband Coding' (Prentice-Hall, 1995).