Brian Smith
Assistant Professor
bsmith@cornell.edu
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/zeno/bsmith/
PhD UC Berkeley, 1994
My research is aimed at developing tools and techniques for bringing multimedia data into the computing
environment, with the goal of making computing with video as easy as computing with text and numbers.
My research this last year focused on programming language support for building processing-intensive multimedia applications. We developed a library, called Dali, that allows programmers to easily write high
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performance processing-intensive multimedia applications.
The functions and abstractions in Dali allow programmers to concisely write programs that process multimedia data, but whose performance is competitive with hand-tuned C code. For example, an MPEG decoder written using Dali is 150 lines long and 10% faster than the Berkeley MPEG
player.
We used Dali to build the Lecture Browser,
which has three main goals:
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Automatically construct high-quality
interactive multimedia documents from a
lecture or presentation, providing a "rich"
viewing experience.
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Provide content-based access to these
documents, via mechanisms such as a table
of contents and a full-text index.
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Accomplish the first two goals without
requiring lecturers to appreciably change
their style of presentation.
We equipped a large lecture hall at Cornell
with two computer controlled cameras. One
camera automatically tracks the
lecturer while the other provides an
overview of the stage. The camera
data is automatically captured and
encoded using MPEG. The captured
data is then indexed using electronic
masters of the slides and combined to
form an edited presentation that can be
viewed over the Web. The resulting
presentation contains synchronized
audio, video, and slides, and is indexed
by time and slide number. The system
is fully automatic--the only requirements
are that the lecturer must start the
system and provide it with electronic
masters of the slides. A demo of the
Lecture Browser can be seen at
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/demo
Awards
- Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, 1997-1998
Professional Activities
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Associate Program Chair: ACM
Multimedia 97, Seattle, WA
Nov, 1997; SPIE Multimedia
Computing and Networking 98,
San Jose, CA, Feb. 1998;
IEEE Multimedia 97, Austin,
TX, July 1997.
Lectures
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High performance tools for
multimedia data processing.
Computer Science, SUNY
Buffalo, NY, Feb. 25, 1998.
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___. Computer Science, Univ.
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL,
Feb. 28, 1998.
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___. Computer Science, Univ.
Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, Feb.
18, 1998.
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___. Computer Science, Univ.
Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, Jan.
29, 1998.
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A toolkit for multimedia
processing. Keynote address,
IDMS 97, Darmstadt,
Germany, Sept. 1997.
Publications
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Compressed domain
transcoding of MPEG. Proc.IEEE Multimedia
98, Austin,
TX (July 1998) (with S.
Acharya).
- An experiment to
characterize videos stored on
the web. Proc. Multimedia
Computing and Networking
(MMCN'98), San Jose, CA(Jan. 1998) (with S. Acharya).
- Motion and feature based video
metamorphosis. Proc. ACM
Multimedia 97, Seattle, WA
(Nov 1997) (with R.
Szewczyk,
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A. Ferencz, and H. Andrews).
Jacl: A Tcl implementation in
Java. Proc. Fifth
Annual Tcl/TkWorkshop, Boston, MA
(July 14-17, 1997) (with I.
Lam)
Software Publications
- Dali, a high-performance multimedia
processing system,http://www.cs.cornell.edu/dali/
- Teki, a Tcl extension installer, http://www/zeno/projects/TEKI/
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Jacl, A Tcl interpreter written in Java, http://sunscript.sun.com/java/
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