Here's a nice article on our team in the Irvine (or the "O.C." for those fans) offices...
The
Multimedia Engineering team consists of 12 people – Keren, Sharon,
Rodney, Steve, Dmitriy, James, John, Chris, Nikun, Yao (our intern),
our new Project Infusion hire, Pei-Hua (who
began this week), and Ann (our administrative assistant).
Our focus is
on the research and development of cutting edge and innovative
multimedia technology, and our team is actively working on a number of
different multimedia products that has been or will be used within
various AOL products.
- Several members of the team are currently working on the research and development of facial recognition technology. We have a working demo that automatically finds faces that are similar to each other, and that can thereby organize a set of digital images based on who are in the images. We are currently in the process of designing the integration of this product into AOL Pictures. A previous version has been available internally on Greenhouse and a new version will be available soon.
- We
have also recently completed the integration of our objectionable
content filter into the FX server and it is now being tested by
AIMPages. The objectionable content filter automatically produces a
score for an image that indicates how likely the image is to be
objectionable. We are in discussion with Uncut Video and Parental
Controls about using the objectionable content filter as well.
- We recently GM'd Unagi, the media engine. This will be used within AOL Radio. The new version is entirely browser supported and is usable on IE or Firefox, as well as on Safari or Firefox on Mac OSX.
- We also provide support for the image compression system used within Turboweb and the image decompression libraries used within the AOL client and the IE browser. For example, we recently provided an important update to Microsoft related to the decoding libraries.
- Our team has expertise in such topics as image processing, video processing, video streaming, and DHTML/Dojo, the members of our team also participate in various cross-departmental teams as well as external organizations. Some members of our team are part of the Image Competency team, a cross-departmental team that performs research into products that use image understanding to address various problems and needs. In addition, a member of our team is an active contributor to Dojo, and has also advised a number of different AIMPages module teams (e.g., BDC, Pictures, Comments, Radio) on how best to use DHTML/Dojo. Furthermore, other members of our team have contributed to FFmpeg, an organization that provides a collection of free software that can record, transcode and stream digital audio and video.
- We also provide support to Warner
Bros. on occasion (e.g., our film restoration technology was used to
restore “The Searchers”, which was released last month, as well as to
restore a number of Looney Tunes cartoons, that will be released later
this year).
- Our team is also active in contributing to AOL’s portfolio of intellectual property. Last quarter, our team submitted two patent applications covering some of the image recognition technology. This adds to our team’s collection of over a dozen patent applications that have been filed over the last several years.
Let us know if you have any questions on Irvine, interested in some of our projects or in the area so you can drop by!
-- Keren and Sharon
Comments