Keynotes










    Visions of Engineering in the New Global Economy

    In this talk, we discuss the trends in the new global economy with specific emphasis on computer industry and their impact on computer education. These new trends include globalization of science including software and hardware development, the emergence of integration of computing and life sciences, interdisciplinary trends, critical needs for making systems easy to use, on time and budget, and with adequate performance. We also discuss demands on future computer scientists and engineers to possess not only technical skills, but also communication, process, and organizational skills. We introduce the leading computer technologies today as well as research and education challenges in the areas of computer science and engineering. We discuss major technology trends including cloud computing, social networks, mobile systems and applications, 3D technologies, and augmented reality. We present several examples of successful high tech companies and their technologies and products, and discuss their vision and strategies for success. In the lights of these global trends, we present our strategy in creating the Entrepreneurial University. We describe our successful research projects conducted as part of our recently formed NSF-sponsored Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. The projects include a cloud-based medical information system, algorithms for 3D image reconstruction and segmentation of brain cells, technologies for coastline security, and innovative mobile systems and their applications.


    Photo Borko Furht


    Borko Furht, Ph.D.
    Chairman & Professor
    Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

    Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center
    Florida Atlantic University
    777 Glades Road
    Boca Raton, Florida 33431
    Tel: (561) 297-3180 Fax: (561) 297-2800
    borko@cse.fau.edu
    www.cse.fau.edu

    Borko Furht is a professor and chairman of the Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. He is also Director of the NSF-sponsored Industry/University Cooperative Research Center at FAU. Before joining FAU, he was a vice president of research and a senior director of development at Modcomp (Ft. Lauderdale), a computer company of Daimler Benz, Germany, a professor at University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and a senior researcher in the Institute Boris Kidric-Vinca, Yugoslavia. Professor Furht received Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Belgrade. His current research is in multimedia systems, video coding and compression, 3D video and image systems, video databases, wireless multimedia, and Internet computing. He has been Principal Investigator and Co-PI of several multiyear, multimillion dollar projects – on Coastline Security Technologies, funded by the Department of Navy, One Pass to Production, funded by Motorola, and NSF PIRE project on Global Living Laboratory for Cyber Infrastructure Application Enablement, and NSF High-Performance Computing Project. He is the author of numerous books and articles in the areas of multimedia, computer architecture, real-time computing, and operating systems. He is a founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer). He has received several technical and publishing awards, has consulted for many high-tech companies including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, General Electric, JPL, NASA, Honeywell, and RCA, and has been an expert wetness for Cisco and Qualcomm. He has also served as a consultant to various colleges and universities. He has given many invited talks, keynote lectures, seminars, and tutorials. He serves on the Board of Directors of several high-tech companies.

     

    Multimedia Processing Meets High-Performance Computing

    In recent years, the top supercomputers in the world were built using processors designed originally for multimedia applications, achieving two dramatic milestones. In June of 2008, the Road Runner, a system at Los Alamos National Labs, using the Cell processor which was originally built by IBM/Sony/Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3, was able to reach the PetaFLOPs performance range for the first time. The Road Runner system used 6,912 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips and 12,960 Cell chips. Only in November 2010, China was able to build, also for the first time in history, a supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, that ranks top in the world. Tianhe-1A major speed boost came from 7000 NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs). This talk will examine the common challenges of high-performance computing and multimedia processing in the light of the rapid advances in the relevant processing technology. Programmer productivity challenges will be detailed and solutions will be explored at all levels of the IT stack.


    Photo Tarek El-Ghazawi



    Tarek El-Ghazawi
    Professor and IEEE Fellow

    The George Washington University
    801 22nd St. NW
    Washington, DC 20052
    tarek@gwu.edu
    www.seas.gwu.edu/~tarek/



    Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University, where he leads the university-wide Strategic Program in High-Performance Computing. He is the founding director of The GW Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). El-Ghazawi’s research interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable, embedded computing and computer vision. He is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC parallel programming language and the first author of the UPC book from John Wiley and Sons. He has received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from New Mexico State University in 1988. El-Ghazawi has published about 200 refereed research publications in this area. Dr. El-Ghazawi has served in many editorial roles and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He has chaired and co-chaired many international conferences and symposia including the 2009 Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Programming Models and Languages (PGAS2009), The 10th IEEE International Conference on Scalable Computing and Communications (ScalCom-10), 2010, and the 9th ACS/IEEE Conference on Computer Systems and Applications, AICCSA2011. Dr. El-Ghazawi’s research has been frequently supported by Federal agencies and industry. He serves or has served on many advisory boards including the Science Advisory Panel of the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. Professor El-Ghazawi was elected to a Fellow of the IEEE with the citation “for contributions to reconfigurable computing and parallel programming”.

     

    Fast block matching algorithms using frequency domain

    This talk will focus on translational image motion for template and block matching applications. While this model of motion is very simple, it is a key constituent of different video processing tasks. More importantly, it is an essential component of video codec which allows temporal redundancy diminution. Translational motion estimation is defined as searching the best motion vector of the current block in the current frame in a predefined search area in the reference frame. Among the various methods for motion estimation, block matching algorithm (BMA) is the most popular. It has been adopted by such leading video compression standards MPEG 1/2/4 and H261/263/264.
    Full search in the block matching algorithm (BMA) finds the global minimum value of matching error surface. It is usually supposed in block matching that the regions of interest do not change their appearances very much. Hence, the sum of absolute difference (SAD) or the sum of squared difference (SSD), are the metrics frequently used in template and block matching. The main reason the use of such metrics is popular is due to their ease of implementation joined with existing large fast algorithms which can be used to speed up the matching process for many applications.
    It is of common noises such as impulse noise or Gaussian noise may happen through the matching process. In this situation, the SAD and SSD criteria are no longer appropriate for template matching because they fail to eliminate these noises when calculating the error measures. A possible solution to this problem is to use a robust estimator as an alternative of a SAD or SSD one. The use of higher than second order statistics is suitable where the image sequence or the signal is severely contaminated by additive Gaussian noise. This type of noise is very common in many applications of signal and image processing. Recently, cumulants have gained popularity in multidimensional theory. In matching purposes, HOS-based cost functions can be assembled from different criteria. However the use of such robust cost functions remains constrained due to the supplementary complexity induced by these types of estimators in comparison with standard ones.
    In this talk, we will present our work on fast methods for speeding up the full search using either second or higher order statistics. These algorithms exploit only the FFT algorithms in their computation. They can be used for any image and signal processing problem which involves the translational displacement estimation.


    Photo Driss ADOUTAJDINE



    Driss Aboutajdine
    Professor

    Mohammed V-Agdal University
    Rabat
    Morocco
    aboutaj@fsr.ac.ma



    Driss ABOUTAJDINE was born on December 30th 1953 in Béni Mellal, Morocco.
    He defended his PhD in 1980 at the Mohammed V-Agdal University.
    Since 1993 he is heading the computer Science and telecommunications Laboratory.
    He was elected, in 2006 and 2007, respectively fellow member of the Hassan II academy of sciences and technology and the Academy of Sciencevelopping Countries TWAS. Dr Aboutajdine co-supervised more than 50 PhD theses and published more than 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings. He organized various international symposia sponsored by international scientific organizations such as IEEE. He was guest editor of a special issue of Pattern recognition journal. He is associate editor and reviewer for numerous international journals. In addition, he conducted many research projects with national and regional industrial partners. He is also member of the editorial board of numerous journals: Pattern Recognition Journal, International journal of Image and video processing, French Journal ‘Traitement du Signal’, Moroccan Journal of Signal processing and computer science, Journal of the National Telecommunication Regulation Agency (ART Senegal) and many other regional and international conferences.

     

    From Single Media to Multimedia – Perception, Coding, and Quality.

    Humans are the ultimate consumers of multimedia information, and effective system design requires a performance metric. While such metrics have been extensively studied for single-media perception for one or more decades, those for multimedia perception and use are still in their relative infancy. In this talk, I will focus on the development of single-media quality metrics for audio and visual information, and contrast it with the development of appropriate metrics for multimedia information. I will describe how humans perceive single-media information, how an understanding of perception has been incorportated into single-media coding and then quality measurement, and I will discuss the current state of understanding of multimedia perception as it has been applied to coding and quality measurement problems.


    Photo Hemami Sheila

    Sheila S. Hemami
    Professor
    Cornell University
    USA
    www.signalprocessingsociety.org/lecturers/distinguished-lecturers

    Sheila S. Hemami (F) received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Michigan in 1990, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in 1992 and 1994, respectively. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Reconstruction of Compressed Images and Video for Lossy Packet Networks" and she was one of the first researchers to work on what we now call "error concealment." She was with Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California in 1994 and worked on video-on-demand. She joined the School of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University in 1995, where she holds the title of Professor and directs the Visual Communications Laboratory.

    Dr. Hemami's research interests broadly concern communication of visual information, both from a signal processing perspective (signal representation, source coding, and related issues) and from a psychophysical perspective.

    Dr. Hemami is an IEEE Fellow and has held various visiting positions, most recently at the University of Nantes, France and at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She has received numerous college and national teaching awards, including Eta Kappa Nu's C. Holmes MacDonald Award. She is currently Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2008-10); Member-at-Large of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors (2009-11), and an SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2010-11). She has Chaired the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2006-07); and served as Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2000-06).

     

Image browsers - effective and efficient tools for managing large image collections

Visual information is becoming increasingly important and tools to manage these vast repositories of media collections are highly sought after. In my talk, I will focus on images and image databases and how to effectively and efficiently access these. In particular, I will present the idea of image browsers which provide an intuitive and interactive means of handling image collections. Not only do image browsers pose a useful alternative to retrieval-based systems, they also provide a visualisation of the whole image collection and let users explore particular parts of the image collection. Apart from introducing the basic concepts and approaches of different image browsing approaches, I will present two particular systems, the hue sphere browser and the honeycomb image browsers, which were developed in our lab, as well as their recent ports to a large multi-touch environment for truly interactive image database navigation.


Photo Gerald Schaefer




Gerald Schaefer
Professor Loughborough University
UK
www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/co/people/acad_staff/schaefer.html


Gerald Schaefer gained his BSc. in Computing from the University of Derby and his PhD in Computer Vision from the University of East Anglia. He worked at the Colour & Imaging Institute, University of Derby (1997-1999), in the School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia (2000-2001), in the School of Computing and Informatics at Nottingham Trent University (2001-2006), and in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University (2006-2009) before joining the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University.
His research interests are mainly in the areas of colour image analysis, image retrieval, physics-based vision, medical imaging, and computational intelligence. He has published extensively in these areas with a total publication count exceeding 250. He is a member of the editorial board of more than 10 international journals, reviews for over 60 journals and served on the programme committee of more than 200 conferences. He has been invited as plenary speaker to several conferences, is the organiser of various international workshops and special sessions at conferences, and the editor of several books and special journal issues.

 

Important dates

  • Submission deadline:
    November 30, 2010
  • Notification to authors:
    January 31, 2011
  • Final version due:
    February 15, 2011
  • ICMCS'11 Conference:
    April 7-9, 2011