Este seminario está cofinanciado por el Proyecto PRO-MULTIDIS-CM (Programa S - 0505 / TIC / 0233, IV PRICIT, CM) y por el Programa Oficial de Posgrado en Ingeniería Informática y de Telecomunicación del Departamento de Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The information revolution of the last decade has resulted in a phenomenal increase in the quantity of content (including multimedia content) available to an increasing number of different users with different preferences who access it through a plethora of devices and over heterogeneous networks. End devices range from mobile phones to high definition TVs, access networks can be as diverse as GSM and broadband networks, and the various backbone networks are different in bandwidth and quality of service (QoS) support. In addition, users have different content/presentation preferences and intend to consume the content at different locations, times, and under altering circumstances.
Substantial research and standardization efforts have aimed at supporting Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) [1][2] which attempts to comply with the scenarios indicated above. The primary goal of UMA is to provide the best quality of service (QoS) or user experience with regard to the actual circumstances.
Important aspects of UMA include the negotiation, selection, conversion, and adaptation of multimedia content (on both syntactic and semantic levels) according to the heterogeneous environment mentioned above. This seminar is dedicated to the adaptation of multimedia content for universal access. In particular, this seminar can be divided into two parts. The first part presents different means for adaptation decision-taking and the actual multimedia content adaptation, e.g., transcoding and scaling techniques. The second part covers a review of the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework which aims supporting the concepts of UMA in various ways.
References: [1] R. Mohan, J. R. Smith, and C.-S. Li, "Adapting Multimedia Internet Content for Universal Access", IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 104-114, Jan.-Mar. 1999.
[2] A. Vetro, C. Christopoulos, and T. Ebrahami, eds., IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, special issue on Universal Multimedia Access, vol. 20, no. 2, March 2003.
Dr. Christian Timmerer received his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) in January 2003 and his Ph.D. (Dr.techn.) in June 2006 (for research on the adaptation of scalable multimedia content in streaming and constrained environments) both from the Klagenfurt University. He joined the Klagenfurt University in 1999 and is currently a University Assistant (Univ.-Ass.) at the Department of Information Technology (ITEC) where he also chairs the IT administration group. At the university, he has been working on coding-format agnostic resource adaptation within the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework. Other research interests include the transport of multimedia content, multimedia adaptation in constrained and streaming environments, distributed multimedia adaptation, and Quality of Service (QoS) / Quality of Experience (QoE). He has published more than 20 papers (incl. book chapters and tutorials) in these areas and participated in the work of ISO/MPEG for several years, notably as the deputy head of the Austrian delegation, coordinator of several core experiments, co-chair of several ad-hoc groups, and as editor for Parts 7 and 8 of MPEG-21, Digital Item Adaptation and Reference Software. He successfully participated in the EC-funded project DANAE (IST-1-507113), is an expert member of the AXMEDIS (IST-2-511299) User Group, and is a member of the External Expert Board of the same project. He is a work package leader within the EC-funded project ENTHRONE (IST-507637) which aims to develop and integrate tools enabling end-to-end multimedia QoS through MPEG-21-based adaptation.
Dr. Timmerer was in the organization team of the 61st MPEG meeting in July 2002 and he was the main organizer of the 77th MPEG meeting in July 2006. He organized and chaired a special session on Universal Multimedia Access at the WIAMIS'06 and he is the chair of the Workshop on End-to-End QoS for Universal Multimedia to be held under the auspices of the AXMEDIS2006 conference. He is a member of the MPEG-7 & MPEG-21 Community (http://www.multimedia-metadata.info/) which aims at bringing together experts from research and industry in the area of multimedia metadata interoperability for collaborative working environments.
At the Klagenfurt University he is teaching operating systems, computer architecture, computer networks and network programming, and distributed systems. Furthermore, he supervised several master thesis projects and other student projects in the area of multimedia communication and information technology. Since 2005 he gives a course about object-oriented programming concepts by using Java at the Shkodra University (Albania) on a regular basis.
Further information, a complete list of publications and MPEG contributions can be found under http://research.timmerer.com.