Abstract: The last 20 years have witnessed rapid advancement of multimedia acquisition, compression, delivery, presentation, and protection. Ever cheaper processing power, memory and higher network bandwidth have also contributed to the widening adoption of multimedia products and services. In this talk, we will review the critical factors impacting the multimedia authoring, delivery and consumption end to end system, some of the innovative ideas that led to the developments up to date, as well as the state of the art in content compression, and delivery technologies. We will conclude the talk with a personal perspective on the critical research areas that will spearhead multimedia research, development and deployment for the next decade.

Bio: Jiangtao (Gene) Wen received the BS, MS and Ph.D degrees with honors from Tsinghua University in 1992, 1994 and 1996 respectively, all in electrical engineering. From 1996 to 1998, he worked at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducted cutting edge research on information theory, coding and multimedia communications. The technologies he invented at UCLA were adopted by international standards such as MPEG and H.26x. These include using structured Golomb-Rice and exp-Golomb codes for image and video coding, error resilient video coding using reversible variable length codes, data partition and single threaded motion vector prediction. At UCLA, he also proposed using syntax based repair and soft decoding for error resilient video decoding and a trellis based quantization algorithm that achieves true RD optimality under the H.263 framework. After joining the industry in 1998, Dr. Wen worked as the Principal Scientist of PacketVideo Corp, CTO of Beijing MediaMagic Ltd., and Mobilygen Corp, where he played an instrumental role in the development and deployment of wireless and low power multimedia software and ASIC solutions. The PacketVideo player is currently deployed on over 250 platforms and in over 200 million cell phones. The Mobilygen family of H.264 encoder chips enables TV quality real time SD and HD encoding at the lowest power consumption in the industry. Currently, Dr. Wen is working as the Senior Director of Technology at Ortiva Wireless, a venture funded company based in San Diego, CA, where he is leading the technology development of a world class content delivery system for mobile and wireless networks that is in the process of being deployed by major US carriers. Dr. Wen maintained a significant pace of publication while working in the industry, and has been actively participating in international standards efforts for many years. He was the inventor of a configurable format compliant encryption technique that was adopted by MPEG-4. Dr. Wen is the author of over 50 journal, conference papers and standard proposals. He holds 11 granted US patents with numerous others pending.Dr. Wen is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.