Keynote Speakers
December 13, 2004
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Biography:
Harald Braun heads Siemens U.S. operations – sales, marketing, service and support – for its IP and traditional switching business as well as photonic networks. His mission is to drive the U.S. market’s migration to a next-generation communications infrastructure, while optimizing his division’s profitability for Siemens shareholders.
Harald assumed his current position in 2002, and is active in both industry and community affairs. He is a board member of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), a North American standards body that leads development of telecom standards, operating procedures and guidelines through its sponsored committees and forums. In addition, he chairs the advisory board of Florida International University’s School of Computer Science.
Previous to his U.S. position, Harald served as senior vice president and ICN head of Siemens Ltd. in Thailand, where he and his team were successful in building sales of Siemens next generation IP network product portfolio. His real-world experience in successfully deploying next generation network solutions will be instrumental in helping our U.S. customers safely migrate to more profitable networks.
Before his assignment in Thailand in 2000, he served as Siemens’ vice president for IP and ATM/TDM Broadband Components and vice president for ATM System Integration and System Test.
Harald joined Siemens AG more than 15 years ago, first working on public communication networks, development system testing and narrowband switching systems. In addition to his management experience, he has worked extensively in development and system testing and integration. He earned a Diplomat of Engineering degree at the University of Aachen in Germany.
Harald is an
avid golfer and snow skier who very much enjoys and appreciates the
fine arts.
December 14, 2004
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James C. French
National Science Foundation
Title:
Using Multiple Viewpoints to Improve Retrieval Effectiveness in
Content-based Image Retrieval
(Presentation
Slides)
Abstract:
A viewpoint is any representational
scheme on some collection of data objects, together with a mechanism
for accessing this content. Thus a viewpoint is any structure
from which we can elicit an informative result from a collection of
data by presenting a query. A multiple viewpoint system allows a
searcher to pose queries to one viewpoint and then change to another
viewpoint while retaining context. This is a very general
framework that is applicable to any information retrieval system.
In this talk, I will illustrate the application of our multiple
viewpoint framework to content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems.
The viewpoints we consider derive from multiple image
representations, multiple queries and multiple CBIR systems. Query
results obtained from the several viewpoints may be presented to a
user in multiple streams or can be merged into a single stream for
subsequent presentation.
I will also discuss retrieval results
obtained from experiments performed with a subset of the COREL image
collection and show how our techniques have been used to improve the
retrieval effectiveness of existing CBIR systems.
Biography:
James French is currently a Research
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Virgina. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and M.S.
and Ph.D.(1982) degrees in Computer Science, all at the University
of Virginia. After several years in industry, he returned to
the University of Virginia in 1987 as a Senior Scientist in the
Institute for Parallel Computation and joined the Department of
Computer Science in 1990. His current research interests include
content-based retrieval and information retrieval in widely
distributed information systems. He is currently on a leave of
absence from the University of Virginia serving as program director
for the Science and Engineering Information Integration and
Informatics Program at the National Science Foundation.
December 15, 2004
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Benjamin W. Wah
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Title: Loss
Concealments for Low Bit-Rate Packet Voice in Voice over IP
(Presentation
Slides)
Abstract:
In recent years, voice over IP has become an attractive alternative to conventional public telephony. However, the Internet is a best-effort network, with no guarantee on its quality of service. A fundamental issue in real-time interactive voice transmissions over an unreliable Internet protocol network is packet loss. This problem is especially serious in transmitting low-bit-rate coded speech in which pervasive dependencies are introduced in a bit stream, leading to error propagation to subsequent frames when loss happens. In this talk, we survey existing work in the area and present an end-to-end loss-concealment scheme that requires no special support from the underlying network. In particular, we focus on developing a non-redundant sender-receiver collaborated multiple-description coding (MDC) scheme. We propose a new coder-dependent parameter-based MDC that generates multiple descriptions systematically based on correlations of coding parameters. The design is done in such a way that requires no extra transmission bandwidth and that adapts its number of descriptions to network loss conditions. Extensive tests on FS CELP, ITU G.723.1, FS MELP, and G.729 for different loss scenarios demonstrate the high quality and reliability of our proposed scheme.
Biography:
Benjamin W. Wah is currently the Franklin W. Woeltge Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, CA, in 1979. Previously, he had served on the faculty of Purdue University (1979-85), as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (1988-89), as Fujitsu Visiting Chair Professor of Intelligence Engineering, University of Tokyo (1992), and McKay Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (1994). In 1989, he was awarded a University Scholar of the University of Illinois; in 1998, he received the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award; in 2000, the IEEE Millennium Medal; and in 2003, the Raymond T. Yeh Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Design and Process Science. Wah's current research interests are in the areas of nonlinear search and optimization, multimedia signal processing, and computer networks. He has served the IEEE Computer Society in various capacities, including Vice President for Publications (1998 and 1999) and President (2001). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS.
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Rita Rodriguez
Program Manager
Computing Research Infrastructure Cluster
Division of Computer and Network Systems
National Science Foundation