Keynote Speeches

Abstract

Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality
Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences. Similarly, virtual environments promise to further change the nature of remote interaction. Virtual environments track verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those signals onto avatars, three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared digital space. In this talk, I describe a series of projects that explore the manners in which the use of avatars qualitatively changes the nature of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars have the ability to systematically filter their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations have a drastic impact on interactants' abilities to influence others in social contexts. Furthermore, using virtual environments behavioral scientists can use this mismatch between performed and perceived behavior as a tool to examine nonverbal communication and social identity. Implications for tele-immersive communications systems and social interaction will be discussed.

Biography

Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (http://vhil.stanford.edu) and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality.

SLIDES : [PDF]

Abstract

View-Based Network Protocols for Multi-Party 3D Tele-Immersive Environments
Tele-immersive 3D multi-camera, multi-display room environments are emerging and with them new challenging research questions. In this talk, we introduce the concept of a 3D view to drive network protocols for multi-party 3D tele-immersive, and to overcome bandwidth/delay barriers of current COTS networks and operating systems for these environments. We will discuss view-based network protocols within a cross-layer control, adaptive network streaming framework, called TEEVE (Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody). TEEVE aims for network protocols with (1) effective and adaptive coordination, synchronization and soft QoS-enabled delivery of tele-immersive visual streams to remote rooms, and (2) effective view-casting model for different view dissemination in the multi-party 3D tele-immersive environments.

This is a joint work with Dr. Zhenyu Yang and Wanmin Wu.

Biography

Klara Nahrstedt is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Computer Science Department. Her research interests are directed towards multimedia middleware systems, QoS-aware resource management in distributed multimedia systems. She is the recipient of the Early NSF Career Award, the Junior Xerox Award, the IEEE Communication Society Leonard Abraham Award for Research Achievements, the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professorship Chair, University Scholar Award, and IEEE Fellow. She is the general chair IEEE Percom 2009, and the elected chair of ACM Special Interest Group in Multimedia (2007-2009).

Klara Nahrstedt received her BA in mathematics from Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1984, and M.Sc. degree in numerical analysis from the same university in 1985. In 1995 she received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Computer and Information Science.

Abstract

Adaptive Streaming of 3D Video over IP
Transmission of video over the Internet Protocol (IP) is currently an active research and development area where significant results have already been achieved. There are already many video-on-demand and IPTV services offered over the Internet. Also, 2.5G and 3G mobile network operators started to use IP successfully to offer wireless video and IPTV services. The next big step forward is destined to be flexible distribution of a variety of 3D video services, including 3DTV and 3D videoconferencing, over IP networks. Various 3D displays require different data representations. Even for the same display technology, different data representations may be required depending on how it is acquired and whether it is synthetically generated. Therefore, the best 3D video format; hence, the streaming strategy vary according to the application and display technology used. IP networks provide the best means for flexible transport of 3D video to allow for multiple 3D data representations and streaming technologies. This talk aims to review recent advances in 3D video representations, coding methods, and various adaptive streaming architectures and protocols to offer 3D video services over IP.

Biography

A. Murat Tekalp received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York, in 1982 and 1984, respectively. He has been with Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester, New York, from December 1984 to June 1987, and with the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, from July 1987 to June 2005, where he was promoted to Distinguished University Professor. Since June 2001, he is a Professor at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. His research interests are in the area of digital image and video processing, including video compression and streaming, motion-compensated video filtering for high-resolution, object tracking, multimodal video analysis, multi-view and 3D video processing, and protection of digital content.

Prof. Tekalp is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of Turkish Academy of Sciences. He was named as Distinguished Lecturer by IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1998, and awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship in 1999. He received the TUBITAK Science Award (highest scientific award in Turkey) in 2004. He has chaired the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing (Jan. 1996 - Dec. 1997). He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing (1990-1992), IEEE Trans. on Image Processing (1994-1996), and the Kluwer Journal Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing (1994-2002). He was an area editor for the Academic Press Journal Graphical Models and Image Processing (1995-1998). He was also on the editorial board of the Academic Press Journal Visual Communication and Image Representation (1995-2002). He was appointed as the Special Sessions Chair for the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, the Technical Program Co-Chair for IEEE ICASSP 2000 in Istanbul, Turkey, the General Chair of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) at Rochester, NY in 2002, and Technical Program Co-Chair of EUSIPCO 2005 in Antalya, Turkey. He is the founder and first Chairman of the Rochester Chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was elected as the Chair of the Rochester Section of IEEE in 1994-1995.

At present, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the EURASIP journal Signal Processing: Image Communication published by Elsevier. He authored the Prentice Hall book Digital Video Processing (1995). Dr. Tekalp holds seven US patents. His group contributed technology to the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards. He is currently an evaluator for the European Commission.

SLIDES: [PDF]