Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Increasing network bandwidth, computing power along with algorithmic as well as business development have led to a proliferation of distributed multimedia applications. Video-on-demand, video conferences and multiplayer games are enjoyed by millions, but their development continues even while these services succeed: video services may develop into 3D freeview experiences, games may turn into all-sensory experiences. Multimedia systems researchers hope that such future multimedia systems appear, and try to shape the future.

In Simula's Multimedia Performance Group, we pursue only one single research goal: we want to improve media streaming. Luckily, this is not a single-minded task. In our view, media streaming comprises the time-dependent transport of any kind of data; speech samples, video frames, avatar movement, temperature or brightness sensor data, human motion, to name a few. Improving media streaming does than mean that we should investigate how to record, process, store, move and present data in the context of a multimedia system.

To focus our research, we perform such investigations in the context of a particular multimedia system idea, with the goal of developing a prototype. The prototype that is discussed in this talk is the Bagadus system (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIEdBYXHbcU). It combines existing work with new insights into adaptive HTTP streaming, parallel processing, scalable architectures, multipath transport, subjective video quality studies; it requires an integration with movement sensors as well as indexing and search; and of course, deploying it for real brings computer science researchers into a room with elite football(*) coaches and players. To see what artists rather than football players did with our research, you could take a look at another video: http://vimeo.com/35689367

(*) "soccer" for Americans

Carsten Griwodz leads the Media Department at the Norwegian research company Simula Research Laboratory AS, Norway, and is Professor at the University of Oslo. He received his Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Paderborn, Germany, in 1993. From 1993 to 1997, he worked at the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1997 he joined the Multimedia Communications Lab at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, where he obtained his doctoral degree in 2000. His interests lie in the improvement of system support for interactive distributed multimedia, with heterogeneous parallel processing, operating systems and protocol support for streaming applications and multiplayer games in particular. He leads the StorIKT project Verdione that investigates system support for the World Opera, and is member of the Center for Research-based Innovation "Information Access Disruptions" that develops next generation search technology.