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DFuse and MediaBroker: System Support for Sensor-based Distributed ComputingDr. Umakishore Ramachandran
Professor, College of Computing
Georgia Tech
Sponsored by Professor Ramesh Jain
That the future of information technology will be dominated by invisible or pervasive computing is a belief that is being shared by several research groups. We focus on an important problem in this space, namely, efficient system support for the distributed heterogeneous computing elements that make up this environment. We address the interactive, dynamic, and stream-oriented nature of this application class and develop appropriate system support. The DFuse framework provides a data fusion API along with an algorithm enabling application directed energy-aware role assignment to the nodes of a sensor network. The MediaBroker framework supports type-aware data transport with capabilities for data transformations and type extension. These abstractions have been implemented on top of D-Stampede distributed programming system. In this talk I will present elements of the D-Stampede programming system and the DFuse and MediaBroker frameworks. I will also present preliminary results of the system support we have built so far both from a programming ease as well as a performance standpoint. These system abstractions enable rapid prototyping of several pervasive computing applications ranging from the control systems inside automobiles and aircrafts, industry automation, transportation, and surveillance.
Bio:
Umakishore Ramachandran received his Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1986, and is currently a Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His fields of interest include parallel and distributed systems, computer architecture, and operating systems. Currently, he is leading an NSF-ITR funded project investigating the programming idioms and runtime systems for a distributed sensing infrastructure. He is the recipient of an NSF PYI Award in 1990, the Georgia Tech doctoral thesis advisor award in 1993, the College of Computing Outstanding Senior Research Faculty award in 1996, the College of Computing Dean's Award in 2003, and the College of Computing William “Gus” Baird Teaching Award in 2004.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen, (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu (top)
Disaster Prediction Response and Recovery (DisPRR) - Australia coming to the RESCUE Dr. J. Chris Scott
Director, Queensland Laboratory
National ICT Australia
In 2004 the Queensland State Government in collaboration with National ICT Australia (NICTA) established a collaborative R&D Centre to operate under the general area of ‘Safeguarding Australia’. A key project developed within this theme is Disaster Prediction, Response, and Recovery (DisPRR).
The project has been developed by NICTA and its three partner Universities (Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, and Queensland University) in consultation with several State Government agencies including Police, Emergency Services, Office of Premier and Cabinet, and Public Works. Also involved are several commercial organizations including SMEs and Multi-Nationals.
This talk will provide background to the establishment of the Centre (located in Brisbane, Australia), the DisPRR project, its objectives, and details of its technical components. These objectives address key ICT operational requirements of both natural and man made disaster prediction, and the associated response and recovery processes. Like RESCUE this project was established before the recent natural disasters in the US and Indian Ocean, and the London bombings. These recent events provide a unique opportunity to drive the project in a way that will ensure valuable outcomes in the future.
The DisPRR project has five technical elements including:
Smart sensors; Information and Human Understanding; Modelling and Agents; Trusted Systems; And Secure and Autonomic Networks.
An overview of these five areas will be provided with an emphasis on the first – Smart Sensors.
Bio (abbreviated):
Dr Chris Scott received his bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland in 1972. Between 1972 and 1975 he was employed as an R&D engineer with an Australian SME designing laser systems. In 1978 he was awarded a PhD from the City University in London, UK for his work on the pulse length dependence of optical damage in electro-optic materials.
In 2000 he joined Australian Photonics Pty.Ltd as General Manager where he was responsible for managing stakeholder relationships and commercialization from the Australian Photonics CRC. He was involved in several start-up companies and their capital raisings, he established and managed the $3.3M Defence project on optical signal processing for radar applications.
In January 2005 Dr Scott joined NICTA as Director of the Queensland Laboratory.
View detailed flyer here or for additional information on the RESCUE Seminar Series, contact Quent Cassen at (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu (top)
Context is King - or How Context Influences Multimedia EngineeringDr. Susanne Boll
Assistant Professor, Department of Computing Science
Multimedia and Internet-Technologies
University of Oldenburg, Germany
Context today is understood to characterize the situation of a potentially mobile user. The aspects and consequences of the availability of context along with media data have recently gained much attention in the multimedia research community. Along some examples we present the needs of context-aware multimedia applications and the potential context brings into the processing stages from creation to usage of multimedia content. In our point of view context influences all phases from along the source-to-sink chain from acquisition, enhancement, storage and delivery to the usage of mobile multimedia content. Along a specific application example, the talk presents an architecture for a context-aware acquisition, enhancement, delivery and presentation in the domain of digital photographs. Combining content, context, and domain knowledge, we enhance the digital photographs with metadata as a grounds for an easier selection, authoring and composition of photos for next generation digital photo services.
Bio:
Susanne Boll is Assistant Professor for Multimedia and Internet-Technologies, Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Also since 2002 she is a member of the Oldenburg Research and Development Institute for Information Technology Tools and Systems (OFFIS) where she is heading the Mobile Multimedia research theme. In 2001, Susanne Boll received her doctorate with distinction at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, which was concerned with the flexible multimedia document model ZYX, designed and realized in the context of a multimedia database system. She received her diploma degree with distinction in computer science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1996.
The focus of her research interests are the development of user centered (mobile) multimedia applications and systems. The research projects Susanne Boll is working on include a framework for personalized multimedia content generation, the development of a mobile platform for context-ware mobile applications, and multimodal mobile user interfaces.
Susanne Boll has been publishing her research results on many international workshops, conferences and journals. Susanne Boll is an active member of SIGMM of the ACM and GI, and also a member of IEEE Computer Society.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on the RESCUE Seminar Series, contact Quent Cassen at (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu (top)
Administration Challenges for Enterprise Data: Overview and Research ChallengesDr. Arnon Rosenthal
Principal Scientist, Department of Cognitive Tools and Data Management
Center for Information Technology
The MITRE Corporation
Presentation Slides 1 Presentation Slides 2
Administration, not hardware or software, dominates the cost of ownership for databases. We survey the most severe administration challenges that large enterprises face, in the areas of access control policies and enabling data exchange. Researchers need to play a key role in ameliorating these difficulties, as much by creating formal proble ms from the practical morass, as by developing new models and techniques.
For data security, we identify two major sources of administration complexity: semantic gaps, and policies that are a composite of many separate stakes. We also speculate about securing overlapping SQL, XML, SOAP, and RDF data. For data sharing, we discuss the need to go beyond passive interoperability, to influencing (not managing!) enterprise data. Throughout, we weave the themes (and research problem generators) of metrics, first class views, and reformulating challenges to apply in an imperfect world.
Bio:
Dr. Arnon Rosenthal works in many areas of data management research, and on data issues in security and object management. The MITRE Corporation, He is involved with advanced data management projects throughout the MITRE Corporation. His current research seeks to simplify administration of data shared among many user communities, including data warehouses, federated databases, and business object suites. One line of research examines security for such environments; another addresses frameworks for general metadata administration there. Previous employers include Computer Corporation of America , Sperry Research, and U. Michigan, plus visiting positions at IBM Almaden and ETH Zurich .
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen, (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu (top)
Computer Vision Research at Watson: From VeggieVision to PeopleVision Dr. Arun Hampapur
Manager, Exploratory Computer Vision Group
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Computer Vision, the science of recognizing patterns in visual imagery has a wide range of applications. This talk presents an overview of projects at
the Exploratory Computer Vision Group in the IBM Watson Research Center. I will briefly describe our work in automatic object recognition
(VeggieVision), automatic video indexing for broadcast (VideoVista), and audio-visual speech recognition. The focus of the talk will be around
Biometrics and Video Surveillance.
In Biometrics, I will present our work on finger print matching, including acquisition, feature extraction and finger print verification. Anonymous biometrics is an effort to build technical solutions to the privacy and security challenges that arise from the wide spread use of biometrics. Large scale biometric matching explores the use of feature based indexing techniques to address the accuracy and performance issues that arise in 1 to many matching.
PeopleVision is a project that is exploring the use of camera based object detection, tracking and classification as the basis for building Smart Surveillance Systems. These systems are capable of automatically monitoring physical spaces to provide a variety of functionalities like real-time behavioral alerts, automatic event based retrieval, event pattern analysis. Smart surveillance systems have applications in a wide range of markets including Homeland Security, Retail, Travel and Transportation and Healthcare.
Bio:
Dr. Arun Hampapur manages the Exploratory Computer Vision Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The Exploratory Computer Vision
Group is a 10 member team with PhD’s from the top universities in the world. The team currently has two thrusts, video surveillance and biometrics
technologies. At IBM since 1997, Dr. Hampapur is one of the early researchers in the field of Multimedia Database Management. Dr. Hampapur
obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1995. Before moving to IBM he was leading the video effort at Virage Inc (1995 – 1997). At
IBM Research in addition to several research projects, Dr. Hampapur served as a design consultant for the CNN Video archive system, a joint project
between IBM and Sony. His role as a indexing technology expert included developing a technology adoption map for the customer and vendor
qualification. Dr. Hampapur now leads an Adventurous Research project called PeopleVision. PeopleVision explores several aspects of understanding
people and their actions using camera based tracking. The technology developed in the PeopleVision project is currently being commercialized in the
surveillance domain as the IBM Smart Surveillance System (S3). He has published more than 40 papers on various topics related to media indexing,
video analysis, and video surveillance and holds 8 US patents. He is also active in the research community and serves on the program committees of
several IEEE International conferences. He also served on an NSF review panel for small business innovation research. Dr. Hampapur is an IEEE
Senior Member.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen,
(949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu. (top)
Integrating Geospatial and Online Information SourcesDr. Craig Knoblock
Senior Project Leader, Information Sciences Institute
Research Associate Professor in Computer Science, University of Southern California
1:00 p.m., 432 Computer Science Building - UCI
With the explosive growth of the Web combined with improved technologies for remote sensing, there are now a huge number of geospatial data sources available online. This includes maps and satellite imagery as well as a large number of online sources of data that can be placed into a geospatial context. The challenge is how to automatically integrate and reason about the available information. In this talk I will describe our work on applying information integration techniques to integrate the huge amount of data available on the web with the widely available geospatial data sources. These techniques include automatically aligning street vector data with satellite imagery, automatically aligning online street maps with satellite imagery, and exploiting online telephone books to identify buildings in imagery.
Bio:He has published well over 100 articles, book chapters, and conference papers in information integration, planning, and machine learning. He served on the Senior Program Committee of the 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2004 National Artificial Intelligence Conferences and the Senior Program Committee of the 2004 International Semantic Web Conference. He also co-chaired the 1998 AAAI Workshop on AI and Information Integration, was program co-chair for the 2000 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling, and co-chaired the 2003 IJCAI Workshop on Information Integration on the Web. He is currently the President-elect for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling and is currently on the AAAI and ICAPS Executive Councils. He was recently named a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen,
(949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu. (top)
Electronic Chronicles: Empowering Individuals, Groups, and OrganizationsDr. Gopal Pingali
Research Staff Member, Pervasive Computing Solutions
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Continuing strides in processing, storage, sensing, and networking technologies are enabling people to capture their activities and experiences as greater volumes of ever-richer media. Consequently, a big emerging challenge today is the organization, retrieval, and exploitation of such data surrounding the activities of individuals or enterprises. The field of electronic chronicles deals with the unified contextual organization, presentation, and analysis of temporal streams of multimedia data captured by individuals, groups, or organizations. The value of electronic chronicles is in converting activity and experience from the past into actionable intelligence in the present. Such multimedia electronic chronicles, with their associated techniques for search and navigation, analysis and reasoning, and prediction and alerting, can have enormous impact on various spheres of life spanning enhancement of personal life, business productivity, entertainment, and government operations. In this talk, I will introduce the notion of electronic chronicles, present some of my work in this area, and outline the research challenges in this field.
Bio:
Gopal Pingali is a Manager and Research Staff Member in Pervasive Computing Solutions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He
received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 1993 and was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs till 2001 when he joined
IBM. His work has spanned real-time visual and audio-visual tracking of human activity, pervasive multimedia technologies, and
contextual interfaces. Gopal leads a team at IBM that introduced steerable interfaces for smart spaces and is currently driving efforts on
chronicling tools for the enterprise. Earlier, he invented LucentVision, a real-time multimedia indexing, analysis, and visualization
system used for two years by 25 television networks in live tennis broadcasts and webcasts. Gopal holds several patents for inventions
in these various areas. He received the Mark Weiser Best Paper Award at the IEEE Pervasive Computing Conference in 2003, the Best
Industry Related Paper Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2000, and the 2003 Pat Goldberg Memorial
Best Paper Award in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at IBM Research. He is an Associate Editor of the
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and has been Chair of the ACM Workshop on Telepresence from 2002 to 2004.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen, (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu. (top)
Hervé Bourlard
Director, IDIAP Research Institute
Professor, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL)
Faculty Sponsor: Ramesh Jain
This talk will start with a brief presentation of IDIAP, mainly focusing on its activities in multimodal processing, with particular emphasis on our“Smart Meeting Room” activities and related large database collection and distribution activities (see, e.g., mmm.idiap.ch)
In this framework, and after a brief discussion of the problem arising from the processing and modeling of multi-channel/multi-sensor signals, we will discuss a few statistical structures that can (1) deal with multiple observation streams (possibly asynchronous, with different frame rates, etc), and (2) accommodate hierarchical structures, thus integrating multi-layer knowledge sources in a principled way.
Different applications in speech and multimodal processing benefiting from the proposed approaches will be discussed, including:
Bio:
Hervé Bourlard received the Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree and the PhD degree in Applied Sciences both from “Faculté
Polytechnique de Mons”, Belgium. After having been a member of the Scientific Staff at the Philips Research Laboratory of Brussels and an R&D
Manager at L&H Speech Products, he is now Director of the IDIAP Research Institute (www.idiap.ch), Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), and Director of a National Centre of Competence in Research in “Interactive Multimodal Information Management”
(IM2, www.im2.ch). Having spent (since 1988) several long-term and short-term visits, as a Guest Scientist at the International Computer Science
Institute (ICSI, www.icsi.berkeley.edu) in Berkeley, CA, he is now an ICSI External Fellow and a member of the ICSI Board of Trustees.
H. Bourlard is the author/coauthor/editor of 4 books and over 190 reviewed papers (including one IEEE paper award) and book chapters. He is an IEEE Fellow “for contributions in the fields of statistical speech recognition and neural networks”. He is (or has been) a member of the program and/or scientific committee of numerous international conferences (e.g., General Chairman of IEEE Neural Networks Signal Processing 2002, General Chairman of Eurospeech'2003) and journals, and past co-Editor-in-Chief of the “Speech Communication” journal.
Over the last 20 years, H. Bourlard has initiated and managed numerous large collaborative projects, and more recently became the coordinator of a large European Integrated Project (AMI: Augmented Multiparty Interaction). He is also part of the European ISTAG (Information Society Technology Advisory Group).
His main interests are in signal processing, statistical pattern classification, multi-channel processing, artificial neural networks, and applied mathematics, with applications to speech processing, speech and speaker recognition, language modeling, computer vision, and multimodal processing.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen, (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu. (top)
Dragutin Petkovic
Professor and Chair
Department of Computer Science
San Francisco State University
Faculty Sponsor: Ramesh Jain
The focus of this work is on the design, implementation, and validation of asynchronous multimedia annotations designed for Web-based collaboration in educational and research settings. The two key questions we explore are: How useful are such annotations and what purpose do annotations serve? What is the ease of use of our specific implementation of annotations? The context of our project has been in the area of multimedia information usage and collaboration in the biological sciences. We have developed asynchronous annotations for HTML and image data. Our annotations allow any WWW user to add, search and view annotations that relate to HTML text and images or image regions from an annotationenabled WWW server. These annotations are stored in a central database thus allowing search and asynchronous access by all registered users. We performed a usability study that showed that our implementation of text annotations offers adequate ease of use for students. We believe that asynchronous multimedia annotations are a promising new way of improving quality and timeliness of WWW-based collaboration in many areas including education, information management, emergency management etc.
Bio:
Dr. Dragutin Petkovic obtained his Ph.D. at UC Irvine, in the area of biomedical image processing. He spent over 15 years
at IBM Almaden Research Center as a scientist and in various management roles. His contributions ranged from use of
computer vision for inspection, to multimedia databases and digital libraries. He is the founder of IBM's well-known QBIC
(query by image content) project, which significantly influenced the content-based retrieval field. Dr. Petkovic received
numerous IBM awards for his work and became an IEEE Fellow for leadership in the content-based retrieval area. Dr.
Petkovic also managed and participated in several other projects while in IBM, among them User Ergonomics Research
(involved in IBM's TrackPoint pointing device), and Foundations of Massively Parallel Computing. In the last few years, Dr.
Petkovic had various technical management roles in Silicon Valley startups, the latest (VMware) involving virtual computing
on Intel Platform. Some of the products Dr. Petkovic helped build won numerous awards and are widely used. He has also
taught at Santa Clara University. Currently, Dr. Petkovic is the chair of the Department of Computer Science at San
Francisco State University.
View detailed flyer or for additional information on this series, contact Quent Cassen, (949) 824-1741 or cassen@uci.edu. (top)
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers 0331707 and 0331690. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
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