Abstract

Our consumption of images (photography/video) continues to grow with the pervasiveness of computing (networking, mobile and media) technologies into our daily lives. Everyone now has a mobile camera, and digital image capture, processing, and sharing has become ubiquitous in our society. This has led to a significant impact on we want to (a) create novel scenes, (b) share our experiences with images, and (c) interact with large amounts of images and videos from many sources. In this talk, I will start with a brief overview of series of ongoing efforts in the analysis of images and videos for rendering novel scenes, interacting with images/videos and collaboratively authoring new content. I will describe some work on video-based rendering and synthesizing novel videos (and scenes) and highlight the technical contributions being made in areas of Computational Photography and Video.

Using these sets of efforts as a foundation I will showcase where things are headed in terms of user generated content, media sharing, annotation, and reuse with large scale networks. In essence, everybody is a content, producer, distributor, and consumer. I will describe some new efforts that move towards understanding mobile imaging and video, and also discuss issues of collaborative imaging, collective authoring, ad-hoc sensor networks, and peer production with images and videos. Using these concepts I will discuss how all of these issues are impacting the field Journalism and Reporting and how we have started on a new interdisciplinary research and education effort, we call Computational Journalism. The concept of Computational Journalism includes more than just imaging, and relates to media and information in general and is aimed at the study of how we remain informed in this connected world. I will outline this new field and relate it back to imaging, with examples from some of our recent work in this new area.

Bio

Irfan Essa is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing (CoC), and Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (GA Tech), in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is a core member of the GVU Center and the Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) Center at GA Tech. Irfan Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Computational Perception, Robotics and Computer Animation, with potential impact in the fields Human Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence research. His work is specifically focused on Video Analysis, Synthesis, and Production (e.g., Computational Photography, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.). In addition, he is also interested in the analysis, interpretation, authoring, and synthesis of temporal stream (primarily video), with the goals of building aware environments, recognizing, modeling human activities, and behaviors, and developing dynamic and generative representations of time-varying streams. Recently he has started on a new path to understand how computation has impacted the field of journalism and has started work on a new area called Computational Journalism. He has published over 150 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on a variety of topics.