Introduction In Book 2 of the Georgics, the Latin poet Virgil writes “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas”. This maxim was true in 29 BC when the Georgics was written and remains true 2030 years later. For those who did not have the chance to study Latin, the verse means “Fortunate who could know the causes of things”. Virgil's maxim will be used in this article to draw some conclusions on current matters. Before getting to the things, however, I…

Introduction MPEG has developed standards in many areas. One the latest is compression of DNA reads from high-speed sequencing machines and is now working on Compression of Neural Networks for Multimedia Content Description and Analysis. How could a group who was originally tasked to develop standards for video coding for interactive applications on digital storage media (CD-ROM) get to this point? This article posits that the answer is in the same driving force that pushed the original settlers on the…

Introduction Purpose of this article is to offer some glimpses of 7 (actually 12, counting JVET activity) days of hard work at the 127th MPEG meeting (8 to 12 July 2019) in Sweden. MPEG 127 was an interesting conjunction of the stars because the first MPEG meeting in Sweden (Stockholm, July 1989) was #7 (111 binary) and the last meeting in Sweden (Gothenburg, July 2019) was #127 (111111 binary). Will there be a 255th (1111111 binary) meeting in Sweden in…

In The Mule, Foundation and MPEG, the latest article published on this blog, I wrote: In 30 years of MPEG, and counting? I somehow referred to the MPEG Mule when I wrote “Another thirty years await MPEG, if some mindless industry elements will not get in the way”. We may be close to know the fate of the MPEG Mule.” We are nowhere close to knowing the fate of MPEG and in this article I will tell another episode of…

What do the three entities of the title have to do together? The second entity is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy,  the tale of an organisation, actually more than one, established by Hari Seldon, who had invented psychohistory. According to that fictional theory the responses of large human populations to certain stimuli will remain the same over time if conditions remain as planned. Then, according to Asimov, psychohistory can predict the main elements of the evolution of society over the centuries…

Introduction I am very proud of the high scientific level of the work that MPEG does with its standards. I think that many universities would enhance the value and effectiveness of the education they provide if they took an MPEG standard, not necessarily a successful one, and have students redo the same process that led MPEG to develop that standard. Because of their high scientific value so many MPEG standards have been wildly successful, as The impact of MPEG standards…