Parallel@Illinois Special Seminar Series

Next-Generation Multimedia Communication and Collaboration

Wednesday, May 6^th at 4:15 pm CT, B02 CSL

John Apostolopoulos, Director of MNCL, HP Labs

ABSTRACT: This talk will examine current and future directions in interactive multimedia communications and collaboration, with an emphasis on highlighting current and future computational bottlenecks. Immersive high-quality video conferencing systems, such as HP's Halo system, are finally delivering on the decades-old promise of effective video conferencing. This is a result of advances in design, algorithms, networking, and computation. Similarly, intelligent network infrastructures are beginning to provide interactive, media-rich experiences and context-aware services for mobile users.

We will touch upon some of the key advances in video, audio, networking, and user experience for making these systems successful. As part of the Need for Speed Seminar Series, we will identify some of the computational bottlenecks which limit us today, and the associated application trends and where we would like to go in the future.

BIO: John Apostolopoulos is the Director of the Multimedia Communications and Networking Lab (MCNL) and a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs. The goals of MCNL are (1) to create compelling networked media experiences that fundamentally change how people communicate, collaborate, socialize and entertain, and (2) to create the intelligent infrastructure which provides predictable, high-quality and power-efficient networking to support current and future applications.

He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in EECS from MIT. In graduate school, he worked on the U.S. Digital TV standard and received an Emmy Award Certificate for his contributions. Recently, his work on transcoding in the middle of a network while preserving end-to-end security (secure transcoding) was adopted by the JPEG-2000 Security (JPSEC) standard. He was named “one of the world’s top 100 young (under 35) innovators in science and technology” (TR100) by MIT Technology Review in 2003, and an IEEE Fellow in 2008.

He currently serves as chair of the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) technical committee, member of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) technical committee, and recently was general co-chair of VCIP'06, and technical co-chair for IEEE ICIP'07. He enjoys teaching and conducts joint research at Stanford University, where he is a Consulting Associate Professor of EE, and is a frequent visiting lecturer at MIT EECS. His primary research interests include improving the quality, reliability, scalability and security of multimedia communications over wired and wireless packet networks.