This is no farewell but see you later...

We all had a good time...






























We also worked hard (some more than others)














And luckily we will still keep in touch after this experience. If our work is good enough we might even have to develop it a little further. And if it is not good enough for publication, just think that it will someway reutilized in Accenture's Technology Labs.

Keep us posted with your news... that is what a blog is for.

Best...

Workshop Over :) and :(

Hmm... the workshop is finally over.... I guess no one will be reading this anymore... anyways I had a nice time..... did a little bit of work..... learned a lot..... made even more new friends....

hope to see u all at enterface 08....

Usman

First week of work

We like adventure... and the eNTERFACE has proven to be an adventure. At least for some of our team members.

We have had our first lost: Nicolau, from Bucharest. He could not make it to the workshop because he had an accident while going to the airport to take the flight that he had to take to come to Istanbul :(

Then, upon arrival from Romania Valentin was sick and by night, as pale as a ghost...

No luck!

But fortunatelly we have only being warming our engines up. We are already working hard. And next weeks are going to be busy...

Arrived in Istanbul

What can I say?

I just cannot complain. The trip to Istambul has been easy. Since I left Nice, at 9 a.m. (punctual flight !!) and I landed at Instanbul's airport (commuting in Munich) no major incidents.

Once in Istanbul I have to admit that I have been very much pleased at seeing that Turkish authorities have everything under control. The complete process from getting the visa (10 eur) to pasing the passport control has been smooth, alightly long, but easy.

What about the luggage? It was already there on my way out. Just perfect!!!

The most exciting part of trip has been the taxi ride to the University Campus. Taxi drivers here are MAD!!! Really... As much as I love car races, I just think that this guy thought he out of his mind. He saw himself as some Schumacher or something. Right, left, right gain.... Beep, beep, I want my way!! (well, this I'm making it up 'cause I don't know Turkish) Taking the exit at the last milisecond... I have to admit that I have some fun there... It should scare me, I know, but I basically think that these guys have developed some way of surviving in this wild traffic, so nobody better to drive you around. Fortunately I do not have to drive myself.

The SuperDom is a nice facility, new. It is located in a pretty modern part of the campus. After dinning (ep, yes! a kebab, a real one!)we have been for a walk around the most ancient part of the university. It is very nice, and from there you have a very impressive view over the Bosphorus Channel.




Ok, Ok, this picture is not mine, I did not have my camera on me. Nevertheless, you can get an idea of what it is.

We have already been informally introduced to students and other members that have arrived today. Tomorrow at 8.30 we officially start the Workshop. One whole day of presentations while we wait for those that still have to arrive.

Only two weeks to go

And in these two weeks we have to make sure that we get everything ready.

I guess that is mostly my task. And I have started by getting a couple of nice webcams that we will be using.

In 4 weeks we have to develop a complete architecture for multimedia communications (video+audio+text+anything else)... What is the big deal? Skype and others seem to do that!! Well, guess what? Skype does not do multiparty teleconferencing, and the latest product that was using such a platform for multiparty videconference (Festoon) seems to have gone out of business.

I admit that there exist several products on the market that, in exchange of a reasonable amount of money, give multipoint video streaming... but it is not our purpose to pay for a product that we do not even know it will fit our needs. So we will probably create our own platform exploiting those services that already other free commercial products provide. So multiparty audio and text from Skype will be good enough, and for the video... we will most likely rely on streaming from IP cameras... We just want to build a proof of concept. We will not reinvent the wheel.

What will this platform allow us to do? It will be the backbone of a series of services for enhanced interaction in multimedia communications for remote meetings. For our brief project we will develop a vote registration system that will manage, count votes and summarize the complete voting procedure regardless of the medium a specific participant is using to connect to the meeting.

It is going to be very challenging to have all this done in only four weeks!!! I fully trust our team...

C U in two weeks.

Finally I find some free time !!!!

Hi everyone , its Usman.....

Well well, it seems every one likes to travel…. It would be wrong if I said I don’t like traveling but my travels have been more unplanned (sometimes even forced). I was born in Lahore, Pakistan which is a nice cultural / tourist city. But when I was only a couple of months old I was forced to move to the deserts of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After that my whole life was spent moving, I studied at various schools but the few important (where I spent the most time) were in Lahore, Jeddah and New Jersey. I got an engineering degree form GIK Institute, Pakistan. Then due to the fact that my travels had left me without any experience of Europe I decided to come to France and what better place than the French Riviera. I got a masters degree in Image Processing and Geometry from University of Nice and started my PhD at Eurecom. During this period I traveled extensively in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherland and Belgium. On the research side I have mostly worked on image processing of the face, sometimes working on extracting local facial features for recognition or studying the relationship between the motion of lips and speech, etc. but I won’t go into the details here if you are interested you can get more info on my webpage.

http://www.eurecom.fr/people/saeed.en.htm

for the photos here are some from my travels

http://www.gikialumni.org/doc/portal/gallery/view_pictures.jsp?galleryId=57&galleryCategoryId=14&pageNo=1

and some with friends

http://www.gikialumni.org/doc/portal/gallery/view_pictures.jsp?galleryId=61&galleryCategoryId=1&pageNo=1

See u in Istanbul
Usman

Second Jerome!!!

Hi everybody,

I think I also have to apologize for my name... If it can help, friends use to call me "Jay" (not very original so it may be the case for the other Jérôme too...) so you are welcome to shorten my name too!

What can I say to introduce myself? Let's begin with the serious stuff: I am Belgian but I like to travel (which is a good point because Belgium is so small...). I studied at Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (FPMs, Faculty of Engineering) where I graduated last June (2006). During my studies I had (among others of course...) the opportunity to do a 6-weeks internship in... UPC in Barcelona and I went to Lehigh University (USA, between New-York and Philadelphia) to do my final year Thesis.

I stayed at FPMs to begin a Phd targeting recognition of emotions (and paralinguistics that can help determining the user's emotional state such as laughters or onomatopoeia) in speech. I am involved in a European project called CALLAS, in which I have to give these kind of speech recognition components. CALLAS project is about integrating emotions in "New Media" (new interfaces such as interactive TV, digital theatre, virtual museum tours,...). I mention that because I also have to "advertise" for CALLAS project and community ;-). So you might hear me talk sometimes about CALLAS in Istanbul... Everybody who is interested about CALLAS can of course ask me for details but also go on the website: www.callas-newmedia.eu Do not hesitate to join the community! As you may have remarked, FPMs has always been involved in eNTERFACE workshops and my colleagues did not stop telling me not to miss this opportunity!

OK, it seems you can have an idea about the serious part of my life. For the rest, as I already mentioned I like to travel. A good point is that being a researcher involved in an international project offers travel opportunities (I just went to Athens and Paris...). Apart from that my major interest is sports! I am playing fieldhockey (I know, it is not very well known...) since I was 4. Now I am in a Belgian first division squad. Do not worry I am not paid through hockey! So I spend a lot of time playing hockey but what makes my girlfriend - who you will also see in Istanbul - sometimes angry is that in my spare time I also like to watch sport: soccer, tennis,... My favorite soccer team is of course Barcelona! But OK let's not annoy people who are not avid sports fan right now, I will be glad to talk about that with anybody interested.

I hope this already enables you to know me a little better.

I am sorry I do not have a nice picture right now on my computer but I promise I will do my best to give you one soon.

See you soon,

Jay-rome