The Future of Multimedia, Multimodal Interaction, and Multi-Disciplinary Innovation Speaker: Hsiao-Wuen Hon (Microsoft Research Asia)
Interacting with Virtual Characters and Social Robots: What is Missing? What is Next? Speaker: Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann (University of Geneva & Nanyang Technological University)
Experiences, Devices, Services, and the Cloud Speaker: Susie Wee (Hewlett-Packard)
Thanks to the tremendous progress in multimedia, and machine perception (voice, vision, touch, pen, etc.) technologies, we are entering a new era with pervasive multimedia and multimodal experience. This experience realized by smart devices in mobile phones, PC's and TV's plus persistent cloud services will have revolutionary impact in all aspects of our lives. Many of our long await scenarios in artificial intelligence and "information at your fingertips" will be fulfilled. In this talk, I would like to use some recent technological advances in related areas to illustrate the excitements and opportunities in front of us. At the same time, most upcoming technical challenges call for multi-disciplinary innovation beyond the current makeup. Multimedia community is inherently multi-disciplinary since its origin. In this talk, I would like to advocate how the community can exploit multi-disciplinary innovation fully to lead this mission.
Hsiao-Wuen Hon is the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, located in Beijing, China. Founded in 1998, Microsoft Research Asia has since become one of the best research centers in the world that MIT Technology Review called "the hottest computer science research lab in the world." Dr. Hon oversees the lab's research activities and collaborations with academia in Asia Pacific.
An IEEE fellow and a Distinguished Scientist of Microsoft, Dr. Hon is an internationally recognized expert in speech technology. He serves on the editorial board of the international journal of the Communication of the ACM. Dr. Hon has published more than 100 technical papers in international journals and at conferences. He co-authored a book, Spoken Language Processing, which is a graduate-level textbook and reference book in the area of speech technology in many universities all over the world. Dr. Hon holds three dozens of patents in several technical areas.
Dr. Hon has been with Microsoft since 1995. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2004 as a Deputy Managing Director, responsible for research in Internet search, speech & natural language, system, wireless and networking. In addition, he founded and managed search technology center (STC) from 2005 to 2007, the Microsoft internet Search product (Bing) development in Asia Pacific.
Prior to joining Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Hon was the founding member and architect in Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. Besides overseeing all architectural and technical aspects of the award winning Microsoft® Speech Server product (Frost & Sullivan's 2005 Enterprise Infrastructure Product of the Year Award, Speech Technology Magazine's 2004 Most Innovative Solutions Awards and VSLive! 2004 Editors Choice Award.), Natural User Interface Platform and Microsoft Assistance Platform, he is also responsible for managing and delivering statistical learning technologies and advanced search. Dr. Hon joined Microsoft Research as a senior researcher at 1995 and has been a key contributor of Microsoft's SAPI and speech engine technologies. He previously worked at Apple Computer, where he led research and development for Apple's' Chinese Dictation Kit.
Dr. Hon received Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University.
Virtual characters and social robots are more and more used for serious purposes such as education and health care. Specific interactive applications are produced to a very high cost. What are the avenues of research to develop serious applications in a lower cost? What will make virtual humans and social robots fully usable and believable?
Virtual worlds should be a seamless extension of real worlds. However, we are far from it. We need to make virtual humans more acting like humans but also to make them behave with emotions as humans. Thus, they should be equipped with properties such as social and cognitive intelligence, personality, emotions, memory processes and user awareness. Users should be confident in the interaction with Virtual Humans or social robots. In this talk, we will present a state of the art of applications, particularly in serious games, show what is missing and show how the research is developing towards believable interactive relationships with social robots and virtual humans.
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 25 years. She obtained several Bachelor's and Master's degrees in various disciplines (Psychology, Biology and Chemistry) and a PhD in Quantum Physics in 1977 from the University of Geneva. From 1977 to 1989, she was a Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada.
Since 1989, she is Professor at the University of Geneva where she founded the interdisciplinary Virtual Humans research group MIRALab. She is the coordinator of several European Research Projects, among them the European Center of Excellence INTERMEDIA (http://intermedia.miralab.unige.ch/) and the European Center of Excellence 3D ANATOMICAL HUMANS (http://3dah.miralab.unige.ch/). She is also Editor-in-Chief of the Visual Computer Journal published by Springer Verlag, Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds published by Wiley, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. For her scientific and artistic work, she has received several awards, among them the nomination of woman of the year in Montreal in 1988, the nomination as computer pioneer in the hall of fame at the Computer Museum of Padeborn in Germany and the selection of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has published more than 500 papers on virtual humans and virtual worlds.
She has been invited to give more than 350 keynotes speeches in various institutions and organizations, among them the World Economic Forum in Davos. She has been Vice-Rector at the University of Geneva from 2003-2006 and she received in 2009 a Dr Honoris Causa from the Leizniz University of Hanovre. She is presently Director of IMI (Institute for Media Innovation) and Professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Experiences, Devices, Services, and the Cloud Computing is now personal, social, and mobile and ingrained in all aspects of our lives. This rapid transformation in the computing industry is due to technology advances in user experience, devices, hardware, software, services, networks, and the cloud. While there are significant developments in each area, some of the largest breakthroughs are coming from advances in their combinations. For example, user experience depends on what the technology can do, so designers and SW developers must work together to create the best experiences; this combination of experience design and software lead to a new discipline that I call experience software. The newest consumer cloud services are not just web pages viewed through a browser, but now combine the web with the sensors on devices as in the case of augmented reality. New form factors of devices are evolving rapidly and being combined with wireless networking and cloud services, giving rise to new usage models and experiences. Also, client applications and web applications/services are starting to merge in the mobile space and PC space. These shifts create a new area I call client-cloud services. New immersive multimedia experiences such as HP Halo are being developed by breakthroughs in the combination of networking, devices, and user experience. In this talk, we will discuss advances in these areas and in their combinations, and we will discuss the challenges and opportunities that lie in the decade ahead.
Susie Wee is the Chief Technology Officer of Client Cloud Services in HP's Personal Systems Group. Prior to this, Susie was the founding Vice President of the Experience Software Business in the HP Personal Systems Group, which had capabilities in experience design, software, marketing, and operations. Susie was the lab director of the HP Labs Mobile and Media Systems Lab, which included research in experience design, streaming media, networking, computer vision & graphics, media security, semantic data management, and next-generation mobile multimedia systems.
Susie was the co-editor of the JPSEC standard for the security of JPEG-2000 images and the editor of the JPSEC amendment on File Format Security. She was formerly an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. In addition to working at HP Labs, Susie was a consulting assistant professor at Stanford University since 1999. At Stanford she co-taught a graduate-level course on digital video processing. Susie received Technology Review's Top 100 Young Innovators award in 2002. She received the ComputerWorld Top 40 Innovators under 40 in 2007. She received the INCITs Technical Excellence award in 2007. She was selected to be an IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has over 50 international publications and over 50 granted or pending patents. Susie received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She authors two blogs entitled Research, Technology, and Teamwork and Reflections.
