Irfan Essa’s Academic Activities

ACM Siggraph 2008 Class on Computional and Journalism

• Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 August 2008 | 1:45 pm - 5:30 pm
• Location: Room 502 A, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Fundamentally, journalism is the process of collecting news information and disseminating that information with a layer of contextualization and understanding provided by journalists in the form of a news story. Recent advances in computational technology are rapidly affecting how news is gathered, reported, and distributed, and how stories are authored and told. New technologies for aggregating, visualizing, summarizing, consuming, and collaborating on news are becoming increasingly popular. They are challenging the traditional practices of journalism and directly affecting the future of news production and consumption. Computation and journalism share a deep interest in information and the value it provides to society, and they are deeply involved in the future of storytelling in various contexts, especially current events. This class summarizes how these new technologies affect journalism, both at the core of the journalism discipline and in its practice and business. Topics include: the technologies that have empowered citizen journalism and related citizen media production and authoring; mobile and sensing technologies that allow journalism to become ubiquitous and pervasive; the changes in photo, video, and broadcast journalism; and how web, online, and science journalism are changing the basic processes of reporting. Instructors focus especially on areas of special interest to the SIGGRAPH community: photography and video, large-scale information visualization, and social networking.

Presentations will be made by:

• Irfan Essa (Georgia Institute of Technology) [website]
• Brad Stenger (WIRED NextFest)
• Maneesh Agrawala (University of California, Berkeley) [website]
• Jeffrey Heer (University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University) [website]
• Eric Ulken (LA Times) [website]
• Chloe Sladden (Current TV) [website]

This course is open to all registrant of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 and has not pre-requisite requirements. See the info on ACM SIGGRAPH Site

ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Paper’s Committee Meeting was held at GA Tech in Atlanta, March 29-30, under the leadership of Greg Turk. Following is a picture of all of us at work, with our sigs, as a note of thanks for Greg

Original Photo by myself, this version with sigs by Fredo Durand.

Journalism 3G: The Future of Technology in the Field (A Symposium on Computation and Journalism) was a huge success.

• We had over 230 registered attendees. Thanks to all participants, panelists, and speakers.
• Use our Social Network (http://cj.crowdvine.com/) to continue the conversation.
• Join the FACEBOOK group (http://git.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18427444784)
• Use the tag “CnJ” on all blog posts and photo/video posts on the web, so we can collect them
• Videos of the event are now available here.

Working with Brad Stenger (Wired), Nick Diakopoulos (GA Tech), Sergio Goldenberg (GA Tech), we are organizing a Symposium on computation+journalism, to bring together computationalists, internet/media experts, and journalists together for a series of panels, presentations, and discussion around how computing technologies are effecting (and changing) journalism practices. We have over 180 people registered and it promise to be a great first-of-its-kind event. This event is being hosted by the GVU Center at Georgia Tech.

I am Co-Chairing  with Drew Bagnell (CMU), Wolfram Burgard (University of Frieberg) a Special Track on Physically-Grounded AI. See AAAI-08: Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chicago, IL, USA. The goal of this special track is to bring researhers from computer vision, robotics, machine learning and activity recognition to AAAI in a unified forum. All papers in this track will be full AAAI  papers.

We received around 60 submissions to this track and expect a few NECTAR (new scientific and technical advances in research) submissions too (DUE Feb 18, 2008). The primary track submissions are in process of review).

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 25, 2008 *DONE*
Paper Submission Deadline: January 30, 2008 *DONE*
Author Notification Deadline: April 1, 2008

Awarded the “GVU 15 years of Impact Award” at GVU 15 Anniversary Celebration and Symposium on October 25, 2007.

• Schedule
• Event Photos
• List of Recipients
• Book of Awards
• QuickTime Movie

GVU 15 Anniversary Celebration and Symposium

GVU will celebrate “15 Years of Impact” at this anniversary symposium on October 25, 2007.

This special day in GVU history will include:

• Morning keynote addressed by Andy van Dam and Genevieve Bell.
• Presentation of 15 GVU Impact Awards for the people, projects and programs that have had significant impact on GVU research activities.
• An afternoon keynote by GVU Director, Elizabeth Mynatt, outlining GVU’s mission and research program.
• A demo reception where you will witness the latest innovations at the GVU Center.
• An outdoor bbq in honor of returning GVU alums and faculty.

We proposed to organize CVPR 2009 Conference in Miami FL, USA in June 2009.

Here are 3 Videos that show me talking about our different efforts to visitors for the Turner Day at the GVU Center.

• DVFX
• Dynamic Video Content
• Computational Journalism

These videos were recorded by a Video Crew from Turner.  Thanks to them for sharing these.

International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) 1996, October 13-16, 1996, Killington, Vermont