RiMCET: First International Workshop on Emerging Technologies in Rich Media Communications Co-located with COMSNETS 2009, January 5, 2009, Bangalore, India IEEE and IEEE Communications Society Co-Sponsorship

The communication paradigm is shifting towards rich media in all walks of life. The impact of multimedia was first felt in entertainment, education and publishing industries but is quickly spreading to other verticals like health care, retail, etc. segments as more tools and technologies are being simplified and made widely available accelerating the integration of rich media in every day communications. Emerging networking technologies including LTE, WiMAX, PON, IPTV, PacketCable are creating huge opportunities by providing bigger data pipes, better reliability, robust end2end multimedia architectures to provide users with rich experiences in prosuming multimedia content and applications. These networking technologies are driving the cost to transfer a byte of information lower by the day. This has also helped fuel the consumption of rich media traffic in a major way by the end user. However this has accentuated the need for rapid scalability and consistency in performance of the networks requiring innovative solutions to provide a great user experience.

Novel Applications and Services are emerging rapidly in the areas of Next gen TV, Retail, Virtual Internet, interactive Games, Enterprise collaboration, Health Services, etc. which thrive on rich multi media content in an effective way. Web 2.0 technologies are making these applications and services easily accessible, usable and mashable catering to long tail content, improved personalization, better precision in targeting end users, enabling social overlays to a growing number of viewers across the globe. As the consumer is empowered with the emergence of 2.0 technologies which is defining new ways of content creation and consumption across the device and network value chains, technologies like SOA, WS and cloud computing paradigms are enabling new frameworks for creating, deploying, managing and measurements of applications. As content, cloud and communities become the driving force for the future it is imperative to start looking at emerging technologies that’ll define future experiences.

The goal of this workshop is to focus on the emerging technologies across the spectrum which is defining novel and richer applications and services around rich media communications. The one-day workshop consists of five technical papers and a tutorial in the niche domain of rich media communications. It is also scheduled to feature keynote speeches by Dr. Guru Banavar, Director, IBM India Research Lab and Dr. K. K. Ramakrishnan, AT&T Fellow. Finally, the workshop will host a panel of experts to discuss the Future of Rich Media in Enterprise Communications.

We take this opportunity to thank all those who made this workshop possible.
Sincerely,
Organizing Chairs
Suresh Chintada, Applied Research & Technology Center, Motorola
R. Ramakrishnan, Applied Research & Technology Center, Motorola
Koustuv Dasgupta, IBM India Research Lab

Workshop Program Summary

RiMCET 2009 Workshop Technical Program Details

09:00 – 09:05 WELCOME

09:05 – 10:00 KEYNOTE – Dr. Guruduth Banavar

Title: New Interaction Models for Users at the Base of the Pyramid
Abstract:
As mobile phones proliferate most sections of society in the emerging world, it is the natural channel for accessing rich IT services. However, the demographics at the base of the pyramid throw open new challenges for creating content and making it easily accessible by a heterogeneous set of users. This talk will present some observations about this class of users, and some new directions being pursued at the IBM India Research Lab to address these challenges. In particular, a new model called the Spoken Web, where voice interactions are used for both creating and accessing web content, will be described.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Guruduth Banavar is the Director of IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL), one of the eight global research labs of IBM Research, which is the leading industrial research lab in the world. IRL has a broad and deep portfolio of research projects, with a major focus on mobile systems and service delivery. IRL’s researchers take a multi-disciplinary approach to solve problems in these domains, bringing to bear our world-class technical leadership in computer science, mathematical science, and the emerging area of service science. Dr. Guruduth Banavar has also recently taken on the role of Chief Technologist of IBM India / South Asia. In this role, he will set the technology leadership agenda for this key geography of IBM’s global business. Previously, Dr. Guruduth Banavar was a Senior Manager at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, which he joined in 1995 after his PhD. His broad technical interests and contributions have been in Service Science, Pervasive Computing, Distributed Systems, and Programming Models. Dr. Guruduth Banavar has published more than 40 research papers, (co-)invented more than 25 patents, chaired major technical conferences and workshops in his research areas, served on 3 PhD committees, and sits on the advisory boards of international government, educational, and industrial organizations.
Please see http://www.research.ibm.com/people/b/banavar for details.

10:00 – 11:00 KEYNOTE – Dr. K K Ramakrishnan

Title: Cooperative use of P2P and Multicast for Video-on-Demand
Abstract:
IPTV delivers video content over an IP infrastructure with the potential to enrich the viewing experience of users by integrating multiple applications along with the video delivery. At AT&T Labs Research, we have been working on mechanisms to make IPTV distribution more robust, responsive and efficient. As viewership moves to a predominantly on-demand mode, distribution of content in large scale is of interest. This talk will describe a scheme we have been prototyping that cooperatively uses peer-to-peer and multicast mechanisms for scalable and efficient Video-on-Demand distribution. We will also present results from the prototype based on traces collected from an operational VoD service. (Work done in collaboration with several of my colleagues at AT&T Labs Research and Univ. of Maryland)

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Ramakrishnan joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1994 and has been with AT&T Labs-Research since its inception in 1996. Prior to 1994, he was a Technical Director and Consulting Engineer in Networking at Digital Equipment Corporation. At AT&T Labs-Research, K. K. is involved in several technical and strategic activities in networking and information distribution. K.K. is an IEEE Fellow and an AT&T Fellow, recognized for his contributions to communications networks, including congestion control, traffic management and VPN services. His work on the “DECbit” congestion avoidance mechanism was recognized in the 1995 retrospective issue of ACM Sigcomm Computer. Communication Review as one of the 16 most important papers published over the previous 25 years in ACM Sigcomm publications. The work once again received the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Paper Award in 2006.

K. K. received his ME from the Indian Institute of Science (1978), MS (1981) and Ph.D. (1983) in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.

11:00 -11:30 TEA/COFFEE BREAK

11:30 – 12:30 TECHNICAL PAPER SESSION 1

#6 Social Networking and Context Management for the Future 3D Internet Authors: Bolla, Repetto, Rapuzzi, Chessa, Lenzi, Furfari
#15 Avoidng White Washing in P2P Networks Authors: Uma S., Kudtarkar
#16 Automatic extraction of highlights from a cricket video using MPEG-7 descriptors Authors: Namuduri et al.

12:30 -13:30 LUNCH BREAK

13:30 -15:00 INVITED TALK – Mr Shailesh Ramamurthy

Title: Scalability Techniques for Visual Media Content
Abstract:
Scalability is a powerful paradigm that enables quick, customizable and interactive rendering of visual media content, immensely conducive towards transport of potentially huge payloads of image or video payloads over channels of limited capacity, for optimal viewing experiences over end-user devices that may have limited resources at their disposal. The paradigm can also support explicit end-user preferences such as interactive region-of-interest rendering of visual media.

This invited talk targets technologists and researchers interested in Scalable technologies for visual media content that enable the ‘Encode Once, Decode in many ways’ paradigm. This paradigm serves the needs of varied media consumers with varying display capabilities connected over channels of varying bandwidths by using a single compressed bit-stream. Any media consumer can, for instance, choose the rendering quality, size, spatial region and colour component(s) that he or she may be interested in. It is possible to extract and decode bytes required for an intended application without having to decode the entire bit-stream.

Specifically, the invited talk would use JPEG200 to explain the scalable principles, tools and technologies. JPEG2000 is a powerful vehicle for multi-dimensional, highly scalable compression enabling resolution, quality, position and component scalability, along with excellent coding performance in terms of enabling high quality at high compression ratio. Potentially, it has a large application base for a number of future imaging applications in diverse areas. Areas where this technology scores over existing still image coding standards include superior low bit-rate operation, progressive spatial as well as quality scalability, transmission in noisy environments, Region of Interest Coding, and, a unified system for lossy and lossless coding.

The invited talk would include the latest developments and directions taken by the Scalable Standards. Apart from the theoretical aspects, the concepts will be illustrated with relevant examples and demonstrations.

Speaker Bio:
Shailesh Ramamurthy is a key contributor to the JPEG2000 program at Motorola and has actively participated in JPEG2000 Standard Committee meetings. He has been working in the area of image, video and signal processing for the last thirteen years, focusing on algorithmic, architectural and implementation aspects. His areas of interest include image and video compression for embedded and mobile applications, scalability in image and video coding, H.264 and audio synthesis.

Shailesh was awarded the Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma Gold medal for his M Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and received his B.E. from VJTI, Bombay.

He has delivered several well received tutorials and talks on the subject, including IEEE-ISCAS-2002 (http://www.securecms.com/iscas2002/Tutorial2.asp),
IEE VIE(http://conferences.iee.org/vie2006/VIE_Final_Programme.pdf), ICMW (http://dsplab.ece.iisc.ernet.in/~ieeesp/imcw05/ ) and SPCOM 2001.

15:00 -15:30 TEA/COFFEE BREAK

15:30 -16:00 TECHNICAL PAPER SESSION 2

#9 An IPTV service model for the multi-world Authors: K. Shrikant

16:00 -17:30 PANEL DISCUSSION

Topic : The Future of Rich Media in Enterprise Communications Innovations in rich media are transforming many aspects of enterprise communications — from new strategies to engage with customers and the supply chain to new ways of energizing employees and partners. This panel will explore the future of rich media in communications as perceived by the distinguished panelists in their respective fields and the technology and market reasons supporting such a future. We will then discuss the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead and what they may mean to today's business models and monetization strategies.

17:30 -17:35 CLOSING REMARKS