Jonathan Taplin
(Annenberg Innovation Lab - University of Southern Califórnia)

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Taplin is the Managing Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab (http://www.annenberglab.com/ ) and also blogs at http://jontaplin.com/ , about which Cory Doctorow of Boing, Boing said, "Taplin's blog is as eclectic as he is, a straight-up analysis blog that rips into the headlines, illuminating everything from economic news to the writers' strike to heavy weather to democratic politics.”

Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival seven times.

In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia. In May of 2010 he was appointed Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Mr. Taplin graduated from Princeton University. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the International Advisory Board of the Singapore Media Authority and the Board of Directors of Public Knowledge. Mr. Taplin was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California Broadband Task Force in January of 2007.

Fernando Pereira
(Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa/ Portugal)

Fernando Pereira is currently with the Electrical and Computers Engineering Department of Instituto Superior Técnico and with Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal (http://www.img.lx.it.pt/~fp/).

He is responsible for the participation of IST in many national and international research projects. He acts often as project evaluator and auditor for various organizations.

He is an Area Editor of the Signal Processing: Image Communication Journal, a member of the Editorial Board of the Signal Processing Magazine, and is or has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He is or has been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees on Image, Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing, and Multimedia Signal Processing, and of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Technical Committees on Visual Signal Processing and Communications, and Multimedia Systems and Applications. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 2005 and elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2008.

He is/has been a member of the Scientific and Program Committees of many international conferences. He has been the General Chair of the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) in 2007 and the Technical Program Co-Chair of the Int. Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in 2010.

He has been participating in the MPEG standardization activities, notably as the head of the Portuguese delegation, chairman of the MPEG Requirements Group, and chairman of many Ad Hoc Groups related to the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards. He is a co-editor of ‘The MPEG-4 Book’ and ‘The MPEG-21 Book’ which are reference books in their topics.

He won the first Portuguese IBM Scientific Award in 1990, an “ISO award for Outstanding Technical Contribution” for his contributions to the MPEG-4 Visual Standard in 1998 and an Honour Mention of the UTL/Santander Totta Award for Electrotechnical Engineering in 2009.

He has contributed more than 200 papers in international journals, conferences and workshops, and made several tens of invited talks at conferences and workshops. His areas of interest are video analysis, coding, description and adaptation, and advanced multimedia services.

Al Kovalick
(AVID, U.S.A.)

Al Kovalick has worked in the field of hybrid AV/IT systems for the past 18 years. Previously, he was a digital systems designer and technical strategist for Hewlett-Packard. Following HP, from 1999 to 2004, he was the CTO of the Broadcast Products Division at Pinnacle Systems. Currently, he is with Avid and serves as an Enterprise Strategist and Fellow.

Al is an active speaker, educator, author and participant with industry bodies including SMPTE and AMWA. He has presented over 50 papers at industry conferences worldwide and holds 18 US and foreign patents. He is the author of the book “Video Systems in an IT Environment; The Basics of Networked Media and File-Based Workflows” (2nd edition, 2009).  Al was awarded the SMPTE David Sarnoff Gold Medal in 2009.  He has a BSEE degree from San Jose State University and MSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

He is a life member of Tau Beta Pi, IEEE member and a SMPTE Fellow.