Keynote Speakers
João da Silva
Director of the Network and Communication in Directorate of DG-INFSO
Dr. JOAO SCHWARZ DASILVA is the holder of a PhD in Computing and Systems Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Over the last 35 years he has successively worked for the Government of Canada and for the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva. He joined the European Commission in 1991 where he is currently Director of the Converged Networks and Services Directorate of DG-INFSO where he oversees all the R&D work relating to mobile communications, broadband networks including satellite communications, audio-visual and home networks; software engineering and ICT for enterprise applications.
He is the recipient of several awards including the UMTS Forum, the IPv6 Forum and the Wireless World Research Forum. He is the author of some 50 technical and scientific papers.
"Did you say Future Internet of ....... Services?"
presentation slides
William H. Dutton is Director of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor of Internet Studies, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He was previously a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, which he joined in 1980. In the UK, he was a Fulbright Scholar 1986-87, and was National Director of the UK's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT) from 1993 to 1996. Bill is also Co-Director of the e-Horizons project of the 21st Century School at Oxford, Director and Principal Investigator of the Oxford e-Social Science node within the UK's National Centre for E-Social Science, and Principle Investigator for the OII’s Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS).
The Social Future of the Internet
Technical forecasts of the future of computing and the Internet abound. As important as these technical perspectives are, these futures are increasingly bound to the evolving choices and habits of users and non-users and their societal implications. I will highlight some of the key ways in which the decisions of users are shaping the social role of the Internet and its potential to transform access to social, economic and political resources. In conclusion, I will identify the emerging politics of the Internet’s future – one that is shifting away from support versus opposition to the Internet to positions on alternative social futures of this burgeoning technological innovation.
Alexander Hauptmann is a Senior Systems Scientist in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and a faculty member in the Language Technologies Institute at CMU. His current main interest has been on multi-media analysis and retrieval. Other research interests include speech recognition and interfaces, translation and natural language in general. Most of his time is spent on the Informedia Digital Video project. This work has also spawned three spin-off companies related to digital video archiving and video question answering.
He is also pursuing projects on video observations for patient care for the elderly and personal wearable memory devices. His current passion is the pursuit of a large-scale concept ontology for multimedia to help narrow the semantic gap. Alexander Hauptmann holds a BA and MA degree in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University, a 'Diplom' in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Berlin and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
Looking Ahead: Media Understanding and Data Fusion
presentation slides
It is reasonable to predict that over the next few years the internet will see an accumulation of increasingly large collections of audio (e.g., iTunes), imagery (e.g., Flickr), video (e.g., YouTube), and sensor information (weather, traffic data) together with rapid and widespread growth and innovation in new information services in the form of mashups (combinations of multiple, separate data sources into one application or display) and social web activities (e.g., blogging, podcasting, media editing). All this is driving a need for improvements in semantic information extraction from structured and unstructured sources and across media, social network and contextual user modeling, multimedia retrieval, summarization of large diverse data sets, and collaborative work environments and interfaces.
This talk will motivate some of the 'grand research challenges' for the next few years based on my research perspectives. These challenges include: Video, audio, image and graphics understanding, and algorithms to support cross source/media mining, retrieval and fusion. The challenges are coupled with increasingly personalized user modeling and adaptive, device appropriate summarization and presentation design.
The result will be increasing pervasiveness of internet services, and noticeable performance enhancements making everything faster, easier, and just better.