Keynote Speaker

Abstract

Networked Media: Trends and Future Research Priorities

The current media landscape is characterised by an explosion of massively distributed digital objects, by a growing share of user generated content and an ever increasing quality of professional content (digital cinema, ultra high definition TV, immersive games, 3D, among others). This is compounded with new consumption modes and users' demands for new services requiring ubiquitous access, on demand, to personalised content and easier methods for content creation and retrieval. The important technological challenges ahead, require close collaboration of multidisciplinary teams

The European Commission is spearheading new areas of research, from basic technologies to service integration and applications. Innovative domains, such as video or 3D object search, next generation of P2P, end to end 3D content delivery and immersive media experiences are some of the topics that the current R&D projects are addressing. This work will be reinforced in the near future with new actions that will offer new opportunities of collaboration to European Industry, Academia and Research Institutions.

Biography

BARTOLOME ARROYO-FERNANDEZ (Ingeniero Superior de Telecomunicacion 1972 UPM, Madrid, Spain; M.S. 1976, GWU, Washington DC) is currently deputy head of the group in the European Commission dealing with collaborative R&D on "Networked Media Systems". He joined the European Commission in 1989 and since then he has been involved in managing the European R&D programs (RACE, ACTS, IST and ICT) particularly in the areas of satellite, wireless, mobile and personal communications. He was with Telefonica de Espana, where he was involved in advanced satcoms developments. He was a researcher at Comsat Labs and ITT Laboratories of Spain.

Abstract

The Joint Source and Channel Coding Saga and Flawless Wireless Multimedia Communications
A Light-Hearted Keynote Address

Shannon's information-theoretic visions were formulated in the context of ideal lossless entropy encoders, which may have a high codeword length and associated high coding delay. Under idealistic Gaussian channel conditions Shannon formulated his source- and channel-coding separation theorem. However, losslessly entropy-coded multimedia message become undecodable in the presence of transmission errors, regardless of the index or position of the corrupted bits. Hence all source-encoded bits have an equally high error sensitivity.

By contrast, practical lossy multimedia source codecs exploit the psychoacoustic and psychovisual masking properties of the human ear and eye and hence achieve significantly higher compression ratios than entropy codecs. Nonetheless, they often still exhibit residual redundancy, which manifests itself in terms of a correlated source-encoded messages that exhibit unequal bit sensitivity.
This unequal bit sensitivity} justifies the employment of unequal-protection joint source and channel coding, exchanging extrinsic information across the entire turbo-transceiver.

Furthermore, realistic dispersive fading channels tend to inflict bursty, rather than randomly distributed transmission errors. This light-hearted keynote address will highlight a range of radical research advances in joint source and chanel coding as well as wireless transmissions in the interest of approaching the Shannonian predictions not only for transmissions over benign Gaussian, but also over hostile fading channels.

Biography

Lajos Hanzo, FReng, FIEEE, FIET, DSc, graduated in Electronics in 1976 and in 1983 he was conferred a Phd in the field of Telecommunications. During his 30-year career in communications he has held various research and academic posts in Hungary, Germany and the UK. Since 1986 he has been with the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. He currently holds the established Chair of Telecommunications. Over the years he co-authored 15 IEEE Press / John-Wiley anglo-american books on mobile radio communications totalling in excess of 10 000 pages and published about 750 research papers. He was awarded a number of distinctions, most recently the IEEE ComSoc Wireless Technical Committee's Achievement Award.

He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of both the Communications Society and the Vehicular Technology Society. He is also a Governor of both the IEEE Communications as well as of the VT Society and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press.