Plenary Sessions

Plenary Speakers

Jill Boyce
Intel Fellow and Chief Media Architect

Title: Video Codec Standardization and Ecosystem Update

Schedule: View the Agenda

Abstract: “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.”  The old quote from Andrew Tanenbaum is very apt for the current situation in the video codec ecosystem. An update will be provided on the latest video coding standards and the progress on their deployment in products and services. Hardware and software implementations, and pain points for video codec deployment will be discussed. Upcoming standardization activities will be previewed, both for typical 2-D video and for immersive media.

Jill M. Boyce is Intel Fellow and Chief Media Architect at Intel, responsible for defining media hardware architectures for Intel’s video hardware designs. She represents Intel at the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) of ITU-T SG16 and ISO/IEC MPEG, and at the Alliance for Open Media. She serves as Associate Rapporteur of ITU-T VCEG. She is an editor of the Versatile SEI (VSEI) and of the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) standard specifications. She is an IEEE Fellow.  She received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas and an M.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University. She was formerly Director of Algorithms at Vidyo, Inc. where she led video and audio coding and processing algorithm development. She was formerly VP of Research and Innovation Princeton for Technicolor, formerly Thomson. She was formerly with Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, AT&T Labs, and Hitachi America. She was Associate Editor from 2006 to 2010 of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

Dr. Christian Timmerer
Head of research and standardization, Bitmovin Inc. Associate professor multimedia communication, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt.

Title: HTTP Adaptive Streaming – Quo Vadis? 

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Abstract: Video traffic on the Internet is constantly growing; networked multimedia applications consume a predominant share of the available Internet bandwidth. A major technical breakthrough and enabler in multimedia systems research and of industrial networked multimedia services certainly was the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technique. This resulted in the standardization of MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) which, together with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), is widely used for multimedia delivery in today’s networks. Existing challenges in multimedia systems research deal with the trade-off between (i) the ever-increasing content complexity, (ii) various requirements with respect to time (most importantly, latency), and (iii) quality of experience (QoE). Optimizing towards one aspect usually negatively impacts at least one of the other two aspects if not both. 

 This situation sets the stage for our research work in the ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory (Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services; https://athena.itec.aau.at/), jointly funded by public sources and industry. 

In this talk, we will present selected novel approaches and research results of the first year of the ATHENA CD Lab’s operation. We will highlight HAS-related research on: (i) multimedia content provisioning (machine learning for video encoding); (ii) multimedia content delivery (support of edge processing and virtualized network functions for video networking); (iii) multimedia content consumption and end-to-end aspects (player-triggered segment retransmissions to improve video playout quality); and (iv) novel QoE investigations (adaptive point cloud streaming). We will also put the work into the context of the international multimedia systems research. 

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 constraint environments) both from the Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) and is the director of the Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory ATHENA (https://athena.itec.aau.at/). His research interests include immersive multimedia communication, streaming, adaptation, and Quality of Experience. He co-authored seven patents and more than 200 articles in this area. He was the general chair of WIAMIS 2008, QoMEX 2013, MMSys 2016, and PV 2018 and has participated in several EC-funded projects, notably DANAE, ENTHRONE, P2P-Next, ALICANTE, SocialSensor, COST IC1003 QUALINET, and ICoSOLE. He also participated in ISO/MPEG work for several years, notably in the area of MPEG-21, MPEG-M, MPEG-V, and MPEG-DASH where he also served as standard editor. Dr. Timmerer has been recently appointed IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for the term 2021-2022. In 2013 he cofounded Bitmovin (http://www.bitmovin.com/) to provide professional services around MPEG-DASH where he holds the position of the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) – Head of Research and Standardization.

Shan Liu
Distinguished Scientist and General Manager, Tencent

Title: Learning Based Visual Data Compression – Technologies and Standards 

Schedule: View the Agenda

Abstract: Machine learning has demonstrated its superior capability of solving computer vision and image processing problems in the last decade. Witnessing such success, researchers and engineers are motivated to investigate learning based technologies for visual data, e.g., image and video compression, and some encouraging progress have been demonstrated in recent years. These research works may be classified into two categories: end-to-end learning-based compression schemes, and learning-based coding tools that are embedded into conventional compression schemes, such as block-based hybrid coding schemes. In this talk, recent technology advances in both of these categories will be introduced, together with updates from relevant standard development activities, such as in JPEG AI, JVET NNVC and IEEE FVC. Challenges that the current learning-based compression solutions are facing, as well as some related research directions and standards such as MPEG NNR and video coding for machine (VCM) will also be discussed.

Shan Liu received the B.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, respectively. She is currently a Tencent Distinguished Scientist and General Manager of Tencent Media Lab. She was formerly Director of Media Technology Division at MediaTek USA. She was also formerly with MERL, Sony and IBM, etc. Dr. Liu has been actively contributing to international standards since the last decade and served co-Editor of H.265/HEVC SCC and H.266/VVC. She has numerous technical proposals adopted into various standards, such as VVC, HEVC, OMAF, DASH, MMT and PCC, etc. She has also contributed to and led development effort of technologies and products which have served hundreds of millions of users. Dr. Liu holds more than 200 granted US and global patents and has published more than 100 journal and conference papers. She was in the committee of Industrial Relationship of IEEE Signal Processing Society (2014-2015). She served the VP of Industrial Relations and Development of Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (2016-2017) and was named APSIPA Industrial Distinguished Leader in 2018. She is on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2018-present) and received the Best AE Award in 2019. She also served/serves as a guest editor for a few T-CSVT special issues and special sections. She has been a Vice Chair of IEEE Data Compression Standards Committee since 2019. Her research interests include audio-visual, high volume, immersive and emerging media compression, intelligence, transport and systems.