News: Keynote Talk by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on Challenges of Mobile Multimedia Delivery in Mobile Learning Communities

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In the last five years, there has been a tremendous increase in video content generation and delivery. Starting with the YouTube era, the demand for video content has reached new heights. This trend has forced the network and service providers to understand the limitations of the current wired and wireless networks (Internet, WiFi, 3G cellular) and bring new technologies for delivering the video content to the end-user. Last mile access technologies play a crucial role in determining the overall performance and end-user experience of multimodal applications;  diverse approaches and technologies (WiMAX, LTE) have recently gained momentum to address this issue. Delivering high quality streaming and interactive video content over heterogeneous wireless access technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, LTE) to diverse mobile handsets with varying display, resource and power constraints opens up new challenges, often specific to the underlying access technology. Furthermore, recent developments such as social media production, multimodal sensing and context technologies, will have an impact on video production and delivery. Supporting a broad spectrum of video-centric applications such as live video streaming, VoD, Video Games and virtual environments (e.g. Second Life), multimedia conferencing and telepresence, surveillance, sensing and social media demands application-specific techniques that adapt to the underlying infrastructure. Supporting ubiquitous video capture, processing and delivery will require systems that leverage a mix of cross-layer technologies starting from application layer down to the physical layer.


There are several key issues that must be addressed to enable ubiquitous video capture and access. How are the future wireless networks evolving towards supporting video content? To what extent can the existing wireless technologies support the quality of the video experience? What techniques must be designed to provision QoS in existing and future wireless networks, provide a real-time assessment to video QoS? What is the impact of social communities on video production and delivery? How can video delivery benefit from recent developments in mobile sensing and context management technologies?