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The keynote talk by Dr. Minoru Etoh  from DoCOMo showed the future of mobile phones and its applications. The perspective that I really liked was –Heart of Cell Phone: Alaways on, anywhere + Sensor Hub that interacts with real environments. The part about the sensor hub is the key. This is the unique feature tat allows it to be the most powerful companion (device) that a person can have.Â
An interesting research is in ‘Viewcast’ project that is for tele immersive environments. This project is project between U of Illinois and U of California, Berkeley (main researchers are a motner-daughter team Ruzena Bajcsy and Klara Nahrstedt, both good friends of mine). This is considered the next step of telepresence and I wrote about it earlier in that context.
I participated in a panel related to Trecvid — in fact on the effects of Trecvid and what could be done beyond Trecvid. Â My views are presented in the presentation given here.
Panel was interesting because some people thought that Trecvid is a great project and is helping the community a lot and should continue as it has been.  Others believed that it is doing damage to research culture.  I enjoyed the panel. And luckily it appears that people liked my views — the fact that stongest proponents of Trecvid invited me for a nice dinner and wanted to discuss my ideas further was encouraging — it shows that community is scientific not religious.