Christian Timmerer is a researcher, entrepreneur, and teacher on immersive multimedia communication, streaming, adaptation, and quality of experience. He is a Computing Now associate editor and chair of the Special Technical Community (STC) on Social Networking. He was the general chair of WIAMIS 2008 and QoMEX 2012 and has participated in several EC-funded projects, notably DANAE, ENTHRONE, P2P-Next, ALICANTE, SocialSensor, and the COST Action IC1003 QUALINET. He also participated in ISO/MPEG work for several years, notably in the area of MPEG-21, MPEG-M, MPEG-V, and MPEG-DASH. He received his PhD in 2006 from the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. Publications and MPEG contributions can be found under http://research.timmerer.com, follow him on http://www.twitter.com/timse7, and subscribe to his blog http://blog.timmerer.com.

Selected topic: In December 2012 he was the guest editor for IEEE Computing Now monthly theme on Social Multimedia Communication (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/archive/december2012). He is particularly interested in how social network infrastructures affect our daily interaction with multimedia content anywhere, anytime, and on any device - also referred to as universal media access (UMA). Most of the technical issues enabling universal media access are solved [1] but the way how users perceive multimedia services - quality of experience - is still far away from being well-understood. The EU COST Action IC 1003 QUALINET [2] aims at working on "methodologies for subjective and objective quality metrics taking into account current and new trends in multimedia communication systems as witnessed by the appearance of new types of content and interactions". Existing social network infrastructures such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ enable new means for interaction (with the content and with other users) and foster the convergence of broadcast and broadband multimedia services paving the way towards new services in this domain. For example, watching online videos together in the context of UMA and the discussion thereof among the participating users. In particular, the inter-destination media synchronisation (IDMS) for services based on standards like MPEGs' dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH) or W3C/IETFs' Web real-time communication (WebRTC) and means to quantify the quality of experience are off interest. Interested parties are free to contact Christian by email christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at or Twitter http://www.twitter.com/timse7.

Keywords: Universal Media Access (UMA), Quality of Experience (QoE), Inter-Destination Media Synchronisation (IDMS), Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)

References:

[1] O Universal Multimedia Access, Where Art Thou? (Index), http://multimediacommunication.blogspot.co.at/2010/03/o-universal-multimedia-access-where-art_19.html

[2] EU COST Action IC 1003 QUALINET, http://www.qualinet.eu/