The interaction with digital media pervades most people everyday lives, both at home and at work. A person may easily understand that he interacts with digital media, or be completely oblivious to it. Application ideas appear limitless, yet so appear inhibitors of new uses. Inhibitors range from unchangeable laws of physics through scalability problems faced in processing digital media to a lack of understanding for people's requirements to appreciate a particular application.
Research focus
The Media Performance Group investigates the means of overcoming or evading inhibitors for the use of time-dependent digital media in distributed systems. The group finds solutions by exploring, understanding and improving on a particular inhibitor in an application context. Improvements are found in better operating systems mechanisms, programming tools, protocols, distributed architectures, digital media formats or a better understanding of people's perception of media in a context. The group takes a multimedia systems approach, whereby successful research leads to quantifiable improvements and success is proven experimentally. The essential results of the group's research are algorithms, methods, tools or prototypes that provide solutions for overcoming a particular set of challenges in using time-dependent digital media in distributed systems that are practical and realistic today or in the near future.
