Thirty-four years ago, the first idea of an “independent” video coding group, later called MPEG, popped up. In a few years, the idea expanded to cover all media for all industries. I have already explained how the very technical and market success of the idea without an internal competition led to its demise. This is summarised by two facts Close to 9 years after publication of HEVC Decoders are installed in most TV sets and widely used Codecs are installed…

MPAI’s 12th General Assembly (MPAI-12) is not going to be like any of the other previous 12 General Assemblies (MPAI was established at MPAI-0) and the the reason is simple to explain. So far MPAI has made big announcements about its plans to develop AI-based data coding standards. In less than two weeks it plans on releasing the first three standards. At its last General Assembly (MPAI-11), it actually published the WDs of the working drafts of the three standards…

Artificial Intelligence is not just another technology coming to the fore as humankind has seen many time before. By mimicking the way humans interpret and act on the new based on their experience, AI may influence its users in subtle ways. The MPAI Statutes read that MPAI’s mission is to produce standards for Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial intelligence. While Moving Pictures and Audio have been singled out in the mission because of their importance, ultimately they…

MPAI’s raison d’être is developing standards. So, including the word in the title looks like a pleonasm. But there is a reason: the word standard can be used to mean several things. Let’s first explore which ones. In my order of importance the first is “information representation”. If there were no standard saying that 65 (in 7 or 8 bits) means “A” and 97 means “a” there would be no email and no WWW. Actually there would not have been…