First IEEE International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience

July 29-31, 2009
San Diego, CA, USA

A very interesting workshop co-chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi with the following topics:

• User Experience Assessment and Enhancement
• Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics)
• Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio)
• Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation
  

Important dates:
Submission deadline: March 1, 2009
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2009
Camera ready submission: May 15, 2009

Further information can be found at http://www.qomex.org/.

IEICE Transactions on Communications: Special Section on Peer to Peer Networking Technology

The IEICE Transactions on Communications issued a special section on Peer to Peer networking technology with the following papers:

• A Remedy for Network Operators against Increasing P2P Traffic: Enabling Packet Cache for P2P Applications. In this paper the authors propose a network layer packet-level caching for reducing the volume of emerging P2P traffic but transparently to the P2P applications. However, doesn't this need a tight cooperation with the network provider (or ISP) which isn't that easy in case of P2P traffic?
  
• Incentive Mechanism for P2P Content Sharing over Heterogenous Access Network. An incentive mechanism called EMOTIVER assign rewards to users according to their access network used.
  
• CAT: A Cost-Aware BitTorrent. In this paper the authors propose to utilize inexpensive inter-ISP connections in order to reduce the networking costs but, again, this requires interaction with the ISP...
  
• An Analytical and Experimental Study of Super-Seeding in BitTorrent-Like P2P Networks. In this paper, the authors present an analytical and experimental study over the performance of super-seeding scheme with the aim to provide answers to the following questions: whether and how much super-seeding saves uploading cost, whether the overall downloading time is decreased by super-seeding, and in which circumstances super-seeding performs worse. The experiments have been performed on 250 PlanetLab nodes.
• Improving Success Ratio of Object Search in Highly-Dynamic Mobile P2P Networks. Improves the usage of P2P technology in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) to help finding the right objects. Evaluation by simulation...
  
• Peer-to-Peer Based Fast File Dissemination in UMTS Network. Sounds interesting too but also "only" simulations. I wonder how this works in a real world testbed...
  
• Cheatproof Dual-Tree Application-Level Multicast for Bulk Data Distribution. Also, in this paper simulation results show that their protocol outperforms the existing protocol from the view point of throughput and resource utilization against member cheating.

An interesting issue but unfortunately no paper addresses issues related to streaming media in P2P networks which, I think, is one of the most exciting topics right now...

International Symposium on Multimedia over Wireless: Deadline Extended

Co-located with the Int'l Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC2009)
June 21-24, 2009 in Leipzig, Germany

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: December 20, 2008January 15, 2009

Paper Acceptance Notification: March 25, 2009

Camera-ready Paper Submissions: April 15, 2009

Registration Deadline for Authors: April 15, 2009

Submission

Please register and upload your paper via EDAS.

All papers are limited to six printed pages, including text, figures and references, and must be written in English and follow the standard IEEE double-column format. The font size must be at least 10 points. All submitted papers would be judged based on their quality through a double peer-reviewing process. Accepted papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings of IWCMC2009, which will be included in ACM/IEEE Digital Library (pending approval). Selected papers will be further considered for possible publication in a special issue of the Wiley Journal of "Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC)," and "International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems (IJAACS)". There will also be best paper and best symposium awards.

Outline and Topics

One of the key elements in the convergence of future networks and services to IP technology is the efficient support of rich multimedia applications and services over wireless networks including sensor and mesh networks. The delivery and transport of multimedia in such wireless environments, to heterogeneous mobiles and users, is very challenging. The multimedia services should face many shortcomings caused mainly by the wireless channel unreliability and its sharing among many users, limited bandwidth, random time-varying fading effect, different protocols and standards, etc. Future multimedia services require innovation and advances in better MAC and routing protocols, session establishment and signaling architectures, cross-layer interaction and optimization, QoS provisioning and continuity, adaptive transmission techniques, and scalability support, among others.

The purpose of this symposium is to solicit high-quality theoretical and practical research on the landscape of recent advances on multimedia over wireless.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Architectures for wireless multimedia communications
• Multimedia over Cognitive Radio Networks
• Multimedia delivery over various types of wireless networks (3G, 4G, ad hoc networks/relay, WLAN, WMAN, multi-hop wireless, and hybrid networks)
• Wireless video sensor networks
• Multimedia over wireless peer-to-peer (P2P) network
• Multimedia delivery for broadband vehicular networks
• QoS support for wireless multimedia networks
• Multimedia delivery over wireless embedded devices
• Scalable multimedia delivery over wireless
• Multimodal multimedia services
• Error resilience and concealment
• Joint source-channel coding and adaptive media delivery
• Cross-layer optimizations and interactions
• Interaction among (MAC), radio link control (RLC), IP and application layers
• Wireless multimedia terminal and devices
• Wireless multimedia traffic modeling
• Multimedia delivery to energy-constrained embedded devices
• Multimedia over wireless testbeds and related research infrastructures and demo
• QoS signaling and protocols for wireless multimedia
• Applications, best practices, and standard's support

Technical Program Committee

• Toufik Ahmed, University of Bordeaux I, France
• Eugen Borcoci, University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Romania
• Cyril Concolato, TELECOM ParisTech France
• Annie Gravey, INSTITUT TELECOM - TELECOM Bretagne, France
• Mohsen Guizani, Western Michigan University, USA
• Zhihai He University, of Missouri-Columbia, USA
• Hermann Hellwagner, Klagenfurt University, Austria
• ChingYao Huang, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Andreas Hutter, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany
• Ebroul Izquierdo, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
• Harald Kosch, University of Passau, Germany
• Sastri Kota, Harris Corporation, USA
• Francine Krief, University of Bordeaux I, France
• Pascal Lorenz, University of Haute Alsace, France
• Ahmed Mehaoua, University of Paris - Descartes, France
• Marta Mrak, University of Surrey, UK
• Liam Murphy, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Hamid Nafaa, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Gabriella Olmo, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
• George Pavlou, University College London, UK
• Kostas Pentikousis, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland
• Fabrizio Rovati, STMicroelectronics, Italy
• Zafer Sahinoglu, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, USA
• Harry Skianis, University of the Aegean, Greece
• Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University, Austria

Further information at http://ismw2009.itec.uni-klu.ac.at/.

Cool URIs

--Excerpted from Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

The best resource identifiers don't just provide descriptions for people and machines, but are designed with simplicity, stability and manageability in mind, as explained by Tim Berners-Lee in Cool URIs don't change and by the W3C Team in Common HTTP Implementation Problems (sections 1 and 3):

Simplicity.

Short, mnemonic URIs will not break as easily when sent in emails and are in general easier to remember, e.g. when debugging your Semantic Web server.

Stability.

Once you set up a URI to identify a certain resource, it should remain this way as long as possible. Think about the next ten years. Maybe twenty. Keep implementation-specific bits and pieces such as .php and .asp out of your URIs, you may want to change technologies later.

Manageability.

Issue your URIs in a way that you can manage. One good practice is to include the current year in the URI path, so that you can change the URI-schema each year without breaking older URIs. Keeping all 303 URIs on a dedicated subdomain, e.g. http://id.example.com/alice, eases later migration of the URI-handling subsystem.

Please, keep this in mind when assigning, generating, etc. URIs because then you're cool!

SMIL 3.0 Advances Standard for Synchronized Multimedia

Just from the W3C news: Today, W3C announced a new standard to make it easier to author interactive multimedia presentations. Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 3.0 allows video, audio, images, text, and hypertext links to be combined into interactive presentations, with fine-grain control of layout and timing.

"The importance of SMIL 3.0 is that it contains a set of user-requested features that provide exciting new functionality, while retaining all the advantages of a declarative (that is, without scripting) approach to building a multimedia presentation," said Dick Bulterman, chair of the Synchronized Multimedia Working Group, which published the specification.

The new features in SMIL (pronounced, "smile") are a direct response to user and industry demand. For instance, the standard allows full-motion, timed captions and labels to be directly inserted in the presentation (called smilText). And SMIL's media pan-zoom control allows people to create "Ken Burns"-style animations easily for photos and visual content. SMIL 3.0 also allows authors to embed timed metadata in presentations, making SMIL a useful descriptive language for the development of Semantic Web resources that evolve over time.

Personal Note: SMIL's Content Control Modules allow for selective/adaptive multimedia presentations through the switch element. SMIL 3.0 Content Control introduces three new attributes: allowReorder, systemBaseProfile, and systemVersion. Additionally, the new module RequiredContentControl has been defined that allows the systemRequired attribute to be specified in profiles that do not otherwise use SMIL content control.

The profile name might one of "Language" | "UnifiedMobile" | "Daisy" | "Tiny" | "smilText" |User-defined-profile-name. User-defined profiles are possible also.

Scalable Video Coding within DVB

Daniele Alfonso came up with this breaking news. I think/hope this will boost SVC's industry adoption.

The last issue of DVB-SCENE (the quarterly magazine of the DVB Project) includes an article by Ken McCann (Zetacast and Chairman of TM Ad Hoc Group on Audio-Visual Content, TM-AVC) entitled "Scalable Video Coding within DVB".

Here is the abstract:

The two main DVB Audio-Visual Coding specifications, for broadcast applications based on the MPEG-2 Transport Stream and for DVB applications delivered directly over IP protocols, are currently being revised to add new options to the toolboxes. Probably the most significant of these new options is Scalable Video Coding, defined by an amendment to the H.264/AVC specification. The objective is to produce an encoded signal that has the capability of being decoded to give video, albeit at reduced quality, from only part of the bit-stream.

Scalable Video Coding is a worthy addition to the DVB toolbox, applicable to a wide range of potential applications. However, as with the other tools, it should be selected for use when appropriate; it is not a 'magic bullet' that gives benefits under all circumstances.

DVB-SCENE #28 is available for download in PDF at this link.

Other articles include:

• Making the Content and Device Value Chains Work for All Stakeholders
• Synchronised Interactivity with MHP
• Mobile Return Channel
• Market Watch