Proactive Cross-layer Design Paradigm for Multimedia Systems

Mihaela van der Schaar

Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Davis

Date: Friday, January 14, 2005
Place: Engineering Sciences Building, Room 2001
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm (Refreshments served at 1:30 pm)

Abstract:
State-of-the-art multimedia technology can now enable a variety of delay-sensitive applications, such as videoconferencing, emergency services, surveillance, telemedicine, remote teaching and training, augmented reality and distributed gaming. These applications will be deployed over multimedia systems with wide variations in terms of device capabilities, network characteristics, and application requirements, giving rise to significant design challenges. We believe that a fundamentally different approach is necessary for designing and implementing multimedia compression and communication algorithms and systems to overcome these challenges. We propose a new paradigm for proactive algorithm and system design that overcomes many limitations of existing theories, algorithms and systems. In the proposed paradigm, multimedia systems proactively adapt to the dynamically changing environment in which they operate by initiating and participating in resource and information exchanges with other systems in the network and across the various OSI layers, to continuously track the optimal operating point in the underlying optimization space. In this talk, we introduce this new proposed cross-layer design paradigm for multimedia systems and highlight several research topics that are currently under investigation in our Proactive MediaNet research group. These topics include the emerging MPEG-21 scalable video coding and streaming standards, cross-layer optimized wireless transmission, new fairness paradigms for wireless multimedia transmission, multimedia transmission over Spectrum Agile wireless networks, novel solutions for multimedia transmission over peer-to-peer networks, formal methods for designing and optimizing multimedia compression and processing algorithms on resource-constrained systems, architecture and power-driven multimedia compression and streaming.

MIHAELA van der SCHAAR received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at University of California, Davis. Between 1996 and June 2003, she was a senior member research staff at Philips Research in the Netherlands and USA, where she led a team of researchers working on scalable video coding, networking, and streaming algorithms and multimedia architectures. From January to September 2003, she was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University.

She is also an active participant in the ISO MPEG video standardization for which she received an ISO recognition award. She is currently chairing the ad-hoc group aimed at standardizing the next-generation video compression technology entitled MPEG-21 Scalable Video Coding as well as the ad-hoc group on Interframe Wavelet Video Coding exploration activity. In the past, she was also co-chairing the ad-hoc group on Multimedia Test-bed. She has co-authored more than 100 book chapters, conference and journal papers in this field and holds 15 patents and several more pending. She was also the General Chair of the Picture Coding Symposium 2004. She was also a guest editor of the EURASIP Special issue on multimedia over IP and wireless networks in January 2004. She gave numerous tutorials on scalable video coding and wireless multimedia transmission at numerous IEEE conferences, including IEEE ICIP, IEEE Globecom etc. She is also currently co-editing, with Dr. Phil Chou (Microsoft Research), a Multimedia Communications and Networking book. She is a Senior Member IEEE, and was also elected as a Member of the Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and was an Associate Editor of SPIE Electronic Imaging Journal. Her current research interests include scalable video compression, cross-layer optimized wireless video transmission, multimedia transmission over peer-to-peer networks, multimedia transmission over spectrum agile wireless networks, power and architecture driven multimedia compression and streaming etc. She recently received the NSF Career Award..

Host: Malgorzata Marek-Sadowska, Professor of ECE