Panel on 'Quality of Experience in Applications, Standardization and Certification'

Arthur Webster is the Chairman of ITU-T Study Group 9, "Television and sound transmission and integrated broadband cable networks". He has for many years participated in technical standards groups – most of which are devoted to the standardization of video and multimedia quality assessment methods. Mr. Webster began participating regularly in ITU-T in 1994 and was a Rapporteur (in SG9 or SG12) from 1995 to 2009. Mr. Webster is the Co-chair of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG), a position he as held since its founding in 1997. Other Standards groups include SCTE, IETF, IEEE, ITU-R SG6, TIA, and ATIS. Mr. Webster has chaired sessions and given presentations at ITU and ETSI workshops. Arthur holds a BA in English and a MS in Electrical Engineering. For the last 21 years he has worked for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (NTIA/ITS) which is a part of the United States Department of Commerce. He manages 2 technical projects at NTIA/ITS, both of which have strong standards outputs. Mr. Webster is a member of IEEE and ACM and holds two U.S. patents for innovations in objective assessment of video quality.

Ingrid Heynderickx received her PhD degree in physics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in December 1986. In 1987 she joined the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven (The Netherlands), and meanwhile worked in different areas of research: optical design of displays, processing of liquid crystalline polymers and functionality of personal care devices. Since 1999 she is head of the research activities on Visual Perception of Display and Lighting Systems and in 2005 she is appointed research fellow in the group Visual Experiences. She is member of the Society for Information Displays (SID), and for the SID, she was chairman of the Applied Vision subcommittee from 2002 till 2007. In 2008, she became Fellow of the SID and chairman of the European Program Committee of the SID. In 2005, she is appointed Guest Research Professor at the Southeast University of Nanjing (China) and Part-time Full Professor at the University of Technology in Delft (the Netherlands). Her main fields of expertise are: psychovisual experiments on quality for display systems, objective quality modeling, impact of visual attention, and 3D displays.

Karlheinz Brandenburg has been a driving force behind some of today's most innovative digital audio technology, notably the MP3 and MPEG audio standards. He is acclaimed for pioneering work in digital audio coding. His honors include the AES Silver Medal, the "IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronic Award", the German Future Award, which he shared with his colleagues and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Furthermore he is member in the "Hall of Fame" of the Consumer Electronics Association and of the International Electrotechnical Commission. In 2009 he was appointed as Ambassador of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. Dr. Brandenburg holds about 100 patents. He is professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau University of Technology and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau, Germany.

Touradj Ebrahimi received his M.Sc. and Ph.D., both in Electrical Engineering, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1989 and 1992 respectively. In 1993, he was a research engineer at the Corporate Research Laboratories of Sony Corporation in Tokyo, where he conducted research on advanced video compression techniques for storage applications. In 1994, he served as a research consultant at AT&T Bell Laboratories working on very low bitrate video coding.

He is currently Professor at EPFL heading its Multimedia Signal Processing Group. He is also adjunct Professor with the Center of Quantifiable Quality of Service at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Prof. Ebrahimi has been the recipient of various distinctions and awards, such as the IEEE and Swiss national ASE award, the SNF-PROFILE grant for advanced researchers, Four ISO-Certificates for key contributions to MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000, and the best paper award of IEEE Trans. on Consumer Electronics. He became a Fellow of the international society for optical engineering (SPIE) in 2003. Prof. Ebrahimi has initiated more than two dozen National, European and International cooperation projects with leading companies and research institutes around the world. He is also the head of the Swiss delegation to MPEG, JPEG and SC29, and acts as the Chairman of Advisory Group on Management in SC29. He is a co-founder of Genista SA, a high-tech start-up company in the field of multimedia quality metrics. In 2002, he founded Emitall SA, start-up active in the area of media security and surveillance. In 2005, he founded EMITALL Surveillance SA, a start-up active in the field of privacy and protection.

He is or has been associate Editor with various IEEE, SPIE, and EURASIP journals, such as IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. on Multimedia, EURASIP Image Communication Journal, EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing, SPIE Optical Engineering Magazine. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of Scientific Advisory Board of various start-up and established companies in the general field of Information Technology. He has served as Scientific Expert and Evaluator for Research Funding Agencies such as those of European Commission, The Greek Ministry of Development, The Austrian National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Portuguese Science Foundation, as well as a number of Venture Capital Companies active in the field of Information Technologies and Communication Systems. His research interests include still, moving, and 3D image processing and coding, visual information security (rights protection, watermarking, authentication, data integrity, steganography), new media, and human computer interfaces (smart vision, brain computer interface). He is the author or the co-author of more than 200 research publications, and holds 14 patents. Prof. Ebrahimi is a member of IEEE, SPIE, ACM and IS&T.