…the first MPEG meeting was held in Ottawa, hosted by the Department of Commerce (Andy Kwon). It was the implementation of a plan that I had presented to Hiroshi Yasuda (NTT Laboratories), then the Convenor of ISO TC 97/SC 2/WG 8 at the WG 8 meeting 10 months before. It was the time when the proposal of the ESPRIT PICA project had been adopted as the starting point of what eventually became the JPEG standard. The development of requirements and…
After a series of ups and downs that lasted about sixty years, the set of technologies that go by the name of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has powerfully entered the design, production and strategy realities of many companies. Although it would not be easy - it would perhaps be an ineffective use of time - to argue against those who claim that AI is neither Artificial nor Intelligent, the term AI is sufficiently useful and indicative that it has found wide…
AI has generated easy enthusiasms but also fears. The narrative that has developed sees in the development of AI more a potentially dystopian machine-ruled future than a tool potentially capable to improve the weel being of humanity. Indeed, some AI technologies hold the potential to transform our society in a disruptive way. That possibility must be kept in check if we want to avoid potentially serious problems. Just think of video deep fakes, but also of the possibility of advanced…
Geneva, Switzerland – 18 May 2022. Today the international, non-profit, unaffiliated Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence (MPAI) standards developing organisation has concluded its 20th General Assembly. Among the outcomes is the communication that a patent pool will soon be established for four of its standards: AI Framework (MPAI-AIF), Context-Based Audio Enhancement (MPAI-CAE), Compression and Understanding of Industrial Data (MPAI-CUI) and Multimodal Conversation (MPAI-MMC). The four standards have been developed based on the MPAI process; Between December…
In the business world, goods are delivered based on technical and commercial specifications. In the standards world, there are good reasons why the goods (the standards) of a Standards Developing Organisation (SDO) are not delivered according to commercial requirements normally accepted in the business world. However, this is not a good reason for an SDO to stay with commercial requirements called “patent declarations” that simply bind the originators to license their SEPs at so-called Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms.…
As reported in a previous post, MPAI is busy finalising the “Use Cases and Functional Requirements” document of MPAI-MMC V2. One use case is Avatar-Based Videoconference (ABV), part of the Mixed-reality Collaborative Space (MCS) project supporting scenarios where geographically separated humans represented by avatars collaborate in virtual-reality spaces. ABV refers to a virtual videoconference room equipped with a table and an appropriate number of chairs to be occupied by: Speaking virtual twins representing human participants displayed as the upper part…
