Plenary Talks

“Innovating the Multimedia Experience”

Mr. Dave Blakely, IDEO www.ideo.com

Abstract

Innovation and creativity are learnable skills, not inborn talents. IDEO has applied its general methods of “design thinking” for innovation on a variety of multimedia programs. In this talk, Dave Blakely will present a set of principles for successful innovation in multimedia. The heart of any innovation agenda is a carefully-chosen interdisciplinary team, typically including members with backgrounds in technology, business, and human factors. Creative leaps can be inspired by empathetic human research, and insights are distilled in synthesis sessions. Techniques such as brainstorming can help teams to direct their creativity, and prototypes can be used to improve visualization and mitigate risk.

Biography

Dave Blakely is a Senior Director based in IDEO's Palo Alto office. He leads Technology Strategy at IDEO, which explores links between emerging technologies, business opportunities and customer needs. Dave implements the methods and tools of Technology Strategy through his management of strategic business relationships with several of IDEO's technology-focused clients such as Cisco. He also advises executives at a number of different technology companies, serves on advisory boards for business and academia, conducts innovation workshops, and speaks frequently to academic and business groups. Dave is proud to serve on the UC Berkeley Engineering Advisory Board, helping his alma mater to adjust the engineering curriculum to the needs of a rapidly changing global economy. He is also a faculty advisor to Singularity University, a new academic institution that understands and facilitates development of exponentially advancing technology to address broad challenges to humanity.

Much of Dave’s advisory work involves helping technology-focused companies to foster a culture of innovation, and to develop products and services to maintain market leadership. Dave helps global companies understand how attributes of Silicon Valley culture can transcend political borders and organizational charts. Recent clients for this advisory work on innovation range from the French government (Dave is working with the French Secretary of State) to senior advisory councils at NASA. Of particular value for many of these clients is Dave’s knowledge of emerging technology developments from Silicon Valley startups.

Prior to his current position at IDEO, Dave built and led a successful business unit of IDEO called “Smart Products” which focused exclusively on electromechanical systems with embedded controls. Dave and his 35-person team provided the market with full-service design and development of embedded systems by assembling an interdisciplinary staff of human-factors experts, interaction designers, and electrical, mechanical and firmware engineers, Working with his team, Dave helped visualize the future of computing for Microsoft, created streaming media players for Philips, adapted new technologies into the workplace for Steelcase, designed a new surgical device for Gyrus ENT, and created a new category of appliance controls for Whirlpool. Dave holds six patents.

Top-notch program management is critical as development timelines shrink, teams disperse geographically, and competition increases. Dave was proud to lead the team that developed IDEO’s Program Management Training. This is a unique combination of soft and hard skills that prepare program managers for a broad range of challenges that emerge on IDEO’s innovation programs.

Before joining IDEO in 1988, Dave worked at Kevex corporation developing electron spectrometers for surface analysis. The robotic arms he developed for this system are still in use at numerous research labs.

He received a BS in engineering physics (Class of 1982) with honors and an MS in Mechanical Engineering with a controls specialization (Class of 1983) with honors, both from the University of California at Berkeley.

“Haptic Design Guidelines and Tools for the Next Generation of User Experience”

Dr. Christophe Ramstein, Chief Technology Officer, Immersion Corporation

Abstract

Haptics (touch feedback) is emerging as a critical feature to improve usability and performance of touchscreens, and more generally to make the user experience for digital devices more engaging, more fun, and more personal. Since 1993 Immersion has been designing and developing technology for multimodal user interfaces with haptic feedback. In 2008, over 15% of the worldwide shipping touchscreen phones use Immersion's haptic technology, a number expected to grow to 25% by the end of 2009. In his talk, Christophe Ramstein will present the state of haptics in the consumer electronics market, discuss the added value of haptics, demonstrate some products, and with TouchSense Studio(tm), introduce basic design guidelines and principles.

Biography

With over 15 years experience in haptics and multimodal technology, Mr. Ramstein leads Immersion's global research and development with a focus on touch innovation and the future of user experience. Passionate about the limitless potential of user experience, Ramstein promotes touch as the cornerstone of the next generation of user interfaces for the medical and other industries. His tenure at Immersion includes senior positions in software development, engineering and research covering several key focal areas for user experience innovation including mobility, medical simulation and more. Before joining Immersion in 2000, Ramstein co-founded Haptic Technologies Inc, a leading-edge award-winning haptics company, as chief architect. Ramstein is both an author and co-author of numerous haptic patents. He holds a Master's from the Institute Joseph Fourier as well as a PhD in Applied Mathematics for real-time physical modeling, simulation, gesture analysis, and composition for musical creation from the Polytechnic Institute in France.

“Light is a Two-Way Street: The Next 50 Years of Video”

Dr. Bruce Flinchbaugh, Texas Instruments Fellow and Director of the Video & Image Processing Laboratory, TI, Dallas

Abstract

When I was a child, circa 1960, I watched the blue TV screen light. I especially watched Saturday morning cartoons, sometimes until my mother shook me (literally) back to reality for lunch. The light that reaches our eyes from video displays has thus brought us many entertaining and captivating events, with content from movies, television shows, video games and now also wide-ranging video sources on the Internet. What will the next 50 years of video bring? I believe that video systems of the future will watch and involve us as much as we watch them. Let's consider the future of video in a new light, in which cameras complement the video displays that have entertained us so well so far. Many aspects of the required technologies are already understood and the transition has begun. As examples: The last fundamental obstacle to video phone popularity is almost gone. The long-anticipated potential of touch-less human-device interaction will be enabled by pervasive cameras. And the traditional definition of 'video' will be expanded as children play video camera games, video surveillance cameras analyze events, and video camera phones provide new kinds of tools for consumers.

Biography

Dr. Bruce Flinchbaugh is a Texas Instruments Fellow and director of the Video & Image Processing Laboratory at TI in Dallas. Since 1982 he has led R&D projects for diverse TI products, including the design of video, imaging and vision algorithms for embedded processors in video surveillance, digital video recorder, digital camera, media player and automotive vision applications. He was TI principal investigator for DARPA Image Understanding Research in the 1990s. He has served on program committees for numerous conferences and workshops, and currently serves on industry advisory boards for engineering departments at the University of Notre Dame and The Ohio State University. He has been honored with two Distinguished Alumnus awards: by The Ohio State University College of Engineering in 2003 and by Otterbein College in 2007. He holds over twenty patents for TI methods and has published or presented in over 75 technical forums including journals, industry magazines, conferences and universities.

“Comparison of Subjective Assessment Protocols for Digital Cinema Applications”

Prof. Christine Fernandez-Maloigne, Professor of Signal and Image Processing in Poitiers University, France

Abstract

Quality assessment is becoming an important issue in the framework of image processing. This need is expressed by the fact that the quality threshold of end-users has been shifted up because of the large availability of high fidelity sensors at very affordable price. This observation has been made for different application domains such as printing, compression, transmission, and so on. Starting from this, it becomes very important to manufacturers and producers to provide products of high quality to attract the consumer. This high interest on quality means that tools to measure it have to be available. For this two types of measurements are possible: Subjective assessment that takes the end observer in the loop of assessment and objective assessment based on the use of mathematical tools that can use properties of the Human Visual System (HVS). The objective tools are separated in three categories: Full-reference metrics using the original image and its impaired version to compute the fidelity, Reduced-reference metrics that embed some characteristics of the original image in order to compare them with impaired ones and no-reference metrics based on the detection of artefacts such as bluriness, blockiness, flickering, ringing…

Objective tools are very interesting because they represent implementable tools that can be more or less complex and can be run when needed without any protocol or specific preparation.

However, some tasks or some artefacts cannot be handled by a mathematical tool because there is a subjectivity dimension that it cannot capture. For example, the cinematographic studios still need golden-eyes for the evaluation of the final work to be projected. Moreover, images and their associated processing (compression, halftoning, …) are produced for the enjoyment or education of human observers so their opinion of the quality is very important. Subjective measurements have always been, and will continue to be, used to evaluate system performance from the design lab to the operational environment. Even with all the excellent objective testing methods available today, it is important to have human observation of the pictures. There are impairments which are not easily measured yet but which are obvious to a human observer. This situation will certainly go worst with the addition of modern digital compression. Therefore, casual or informal subjective testing by a reasonably expert viewer remains an important part of system evaluation or monitoring. Formal subjective testing has been used for many years with a relatively stable set of standard methods until the advent of digital compression subjective testing described in the ITU recommendation and ISO standards. Moreover, several test-plans have been defined by the Video Expert Quality Group (VQEG) for television, multimedia, HDTV…

This work is dedicated to the comparison of subjective methodologies in the digital cinema framework. The main goal is to determine with a group of observers, which methodology is better for assessing digital cinema content and what is the annoyance level associated to each of them. Several configurations are tested side by side, Butterfly, one by one, Horizontal scroll, vertical scroll, Horizontal and vertical scroll.

Biography

Christine Fernandez-Maloigne is currently Professor of signal and image processing in Poitiers University, France. She manages a regional research federation which gathers 260 researchers in TIC in region Poitou-Charentes, in the area of imaging, data mining, and communication systems. PRIDES federation (Research Program in Images, Datas, SystEms) involves 5 laboratories in Poitiers, la Rochelle and Angoulème, in the west of France. She is director of one of these laboratories, XLIM-SIC (Signal Image and Communication, Joint Research Unit betwwen CNRS and University of Poitiers

Christine Fernandez-Maloigne was graduated at the University of Technology of Compiegne (UTC), France, as a computer engineer in 1986. She received her Ph.D. degree in Image Processing at this University in 1989. She was associated Professor in UTC between 1990 and 1996. She succeeded in enabling degree to manage researches at the University of Lille, France, in 1995. Then she moved to University of Poitiers, France, in 1996, to create a new research pole for image processing and analysis. In the same time, she organized first national research actions regarding colour imaging in the CNRS (National Centre of Scientific Research), in 1997. Afterwards she was founder member of the French National Colour Imaging Group (GFINC) in 2002. She is currently treasurer of this association. The research activities of Christine Fernandez-Maloigne are focused on colour imaging, including fundamental researches about introduction of human visual system models in multiscale colour image processes as well as industrial contracts. The different studies concern image and video coding, indexing, watermarking and image quality assessment. The application areas deal with industrial quality control, biomedical, and audio-visual digital contents. The laboratory is involved in numerous national and european projects about colour imaging and Christine Fernandez-Maloigne participates to organization of numerous national meetings, summer schools, as well as coordination of special issues in scientific papers. She is co-author of numerous books, papers in journals and presentations in famous conferences about digital colour. In a parallel direction, Professor Fernandez-Maloigne wined a national

prize for the creation of an innovative computer engineering company, in 2001.

At a national level, Christine Fernandez-Maloigne is associated scientific director of a national research group of CNRS: GDR ISIS since 2005 and member of executive committee of AFRIF/IAPR. She is member of the National Council of the French Universities (CNU) since 2008. She is an expert for AERES (National Agency of Research and Teaching Evaluation), for DGA (General Direction of Armies), OSEO/ANVAR (National Agency for Research Valorisation) and for the European Commission (Information Society Technologies programme). At an European level, she is also member of the French National Body for the ISO JPEG2000, since 2000, and French representative of the CIE Division 8 (Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage, ImageTechnology Division) where she manages a Technical committee about image and video compression quality assessment (TC8-12). Finally, she is a fellow of IS&T, she was General Chair and organizer of the first IS&T European Conference about Colour in Graphics Image and Processing (CGIV) held in Poitiers in 2002, which is now a reference in the area of colour imaging (last edition in Barcelona in 2008). She received a service award from IS&T for her European action in the area of colour imaging.

At the end, Christine Fernandez-Maloigne has 4 children and she is involved in humane associations regarding handicapped children in the world.

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