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