The appetite for content consumption and easier access to information continues to increase rapidly. Access devices are also evolving such that we have a wide choice of terminal and network capabilities; this diversity and the resulting convenience is having direct impact on lifestyles. The result is that people, both in their personal and professional lives, are increasingly creators as well as consumers of digital media. They thus demand solutions that deliver accessible and advanced multimedia creation and consumption on many platforms. These new content providers and the traditional media sources share a core set of concerns: management of content, re-purposing content based on user preferences and device capabilities, protection of rights, protection from unauthorized access/modification, protection of privacy of providers and consumers, etc. It is the need for technical solutions meeting these challenges that is the motivation for the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework initiative, which will enable the transparent and augmented use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices. To reach this goal, MPEG-21 is defining an open standards based framework for multimedia delivery and consumption by all the players in the delivery and consumption chain. During this talk, the basic concepts of MPEG-21 technology will be discussed. Besides, some demonstrations of prototype MPEG-21 applications will be shown. Finally, we will also discuss a large-scale use case of MPEG-21 technology: digital archiving.
Rik Van de Walle received his degree in physics engineering (1994) and his PhD degree (1998) at Ghent University. The topic of his PhD was (medical) image processing. After finishing his PhD, Rik Van de Walle became a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Arizona (Tucson, USA) in 1998. By the end of 1998, he returned to Ghent University and obtained an appointment from the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (Belgium). In 2001, he became a professor at the Department of Electronics and Information Systems (Ghent University-IMEC, Belgium), where he founded the Multimedia Lab. Today, the Multimedia Lab counts about 10 researchers. Although this research group was set up only a couple of years ago, a large number of articles have already been published by this group in the field of multimedia systems and applications. Articles have been published in journals (e.g., IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, ASLIB Proceedings, Pattern Recognition Letters) and proceedings of the most important conferences in the field of multimedia systems and applications (e.g., IEEE ICME, W3C Conference, etc.). Moreover, Multimedia Lab is very active within MPEG standardization, via the submission of technical contributions; by chairing several ad-hoc groups; and through the editorship of several specifications. More specifically, Rik Van de Walle has been/is editor of the following MPEG specifications: MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language; MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing; MPEG-21 Digital Item Processing - Technologies under Consideration; and MPEG-21 Reference Software. Rik Van de Walle has been involved in the organization of and/or review of papers for several international conferences (e.g., IEEE ICME, WIAMIS, ISAS-SCI, ACIVS, Mirage, EUROMEDIA-Mediatec). Rik Van de Walle is a member of IEEE, ESEM, IFMBE, ISMRM, BSMBEC-NCBME and KVIV. His current research interests include MPEG-21-related technologies (Digital Item Processing and Digital Item Adaptation); the development of new tools for setting up and managing mobile multimedia applications; semantic indexing and archiving digital multimedia objects (based on both MPEG-21 and METS); exploitation of scalability with respect to the delivery of multimedia content under varying circumstances (e.g., changing network characteristics and/or time-varying terminal characteristics); hardware/software co-design for multimedia systems; (re)configuration of hardware for embedded multimedia systems; complexity analysis and optimization of video codecs; development of e-learning tools. This research work is supported by local funding from Ghent University, the Flemish Government, the Belgian government, and the European Union. Rik Van de Walle is currently full-time professor at Ghent University, where he is responsible for the courses on multimedia technology, internet applications, and medical informatics.
Sprecher: Prof. Dr. Rik Van de Walle Wann: Freitag, 23. Jänner 2004, 14:00 Uhr (s.t.) Wo: HS 1, Universität Klagenfurt