iQua Research Group

However one sees it (the hype or the stock price), the first big hit of the new year seems to be the iPhone from Apple. Though it may be a heated debate if the iPhone is truly a revolutionary product, I can already see how it helps academics, including myself, to travel light to conferences without a laptop computer.

As almost everyone else in academia, I tend to do three things on conference trips: checking emails, browsing the web, and doing presentations. Checking emails and browsing the web seem to be as intuitive as it can get with the new multi-touch UI on the iPhone, not to mention the nice-to-have features of making regular phone calls and taking random snapshot travel pictures. Most conferences these days have WiFi available on-site, and the iPhone can take advantage of that as well as any laptops.

Though not mentioned in its set of core features, I can see that, possibly with a few accessories, the iPhone is readily capable of doing conference presentations. Though the current iPods can be used to power presentations, they involve tweaks such as saving the slides as JPEG or Quicktime movies. In contrast, the OS X core running in the iPhone should have no problems running a lightweight Keynote or PowerPoint, and the MacWorld keynote address was already using its 30-pin iPod connector to send digital video out of the device, making it a natural choice of connecting to a digital projector with some kind of a video-out accessory. The iPhone supports Bluetooth, making it easy to find a Bluetooth clicker to control the presentation.

But how about the tons of emails that need replies in a hurry? I can imagine a foldable keyboard (like the stowaway ones available from iGo for Palm) produced as an accessory and connected to the iPhone via Bluetooth, making it a time saver to type longer emails on the device. Needs more storage space? iPod already has a iPod dock connector to firewire cable available, and it would not be a pipe dream to connect the iPhone to a portable firewire hard drive, again via the 30-pin iPod connector. At this point, if the iPhone would takeoff and evolve into an ecosystem as the Apple stock price suggested, in a year or two, the iPhone may be the only electronic device that I carry when traveling.

But that may not be the most exciting time saver — when I think of the possibility of using this device to handle all pending emails of the day while offline on the subway, on my commute to and from downtown, and then use WiFi to send them out when I am out of the subway. Though existing devices can be used for all these, the experience may not be as trouble-free and seamless as I liked. All considered, the iPhone may make it more productive to work, rather than just yet another gadget one plays with.

Update on October 2, 2007: With the recently released firmware 1.1.1, iPhone supports TV out to send video signals to external displays, using an Apple composite AV cable or an Apple component AV cable. I guess the day of traveling light and delivering presentations with an iPhone is not too far away.

It has always been my dream to be able to watch on-demand archived webcast of academic lectures and conference presentations, and to appreciate their depth and inspiration. Unfortunately, it appears that we are not there just yet. Would academic work in the area of multimedia systems and networking help us to achieve such a vision?

During the years of research since I was a graduate student at UIUC, I have always had questions on the impact of academic papers in the real world, which seems to be dominated by Microsoft (with its proprietary Windows Media Video), RealNetworks, and Apple Quicktime. The myriad of protocols (e.g., RTP, RTSP, RTCP, SIP, H.323) and codecs (e.g., MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264) seems to be dazzling, but I have not seen many promising academic proposals been deployed to real-world use, such as layered coding and multiple description coding. For example, papers as recent as SIGCOMM 2006 (titled Enabling Contribution Awareness in an Overlay Broadcasting System) still propose to use layered MDC to provide differentiated qualities to different peers in overlay broadcasting, while successful codecs of layered coding and MDC — or at least open source ones — are nowhere in sight.

No all academic proposals are shelved or archived, of course. I have had the deepest respect for at least two pieces of work from academia. First, Professor Henning Schulzrinne’s work on RTP, RTSP and SIP. They have not only become industry standards, adopted by the Apple Darwin Streaming Server (which is open source), but also embraced the design principles of simplicity, which I cherish.

Second, Professor Larry Rowe’s recent work on lecture webcasting has captured my interests about a year ago. Professor Rowe has had a technical report documenting his experiences webcasting NOSSDAV 2005 presentations, with both positive and negative lessons learned. Since then, he has had even more engaging stories (in the form similar to modern blogs but presented as static web pages) about ongoing challenges with Quicktime upgrades and video qualities at a high bit rate (1200 Kbps).

Professor Rowe preferred the Darwin Quicktime streaming server since it is open source and uses open standards such as RTP and RTSP, but then believed that even the Quicktime streaming technology was still immature to be used for a large digital library. I enjoyed reading the paper since I think it was impartial and involved a large amount of work towards bridging academia and practice (at least bringing conference talks to the web!), but unfortunately the paper was not published at any prestigious conferences or journals.

I am very curious to see if, in the next five years, I could stream a large number of archived webcasts of lectures and talks to my office desktop. Youtube’s success has made a point that even poor-quality ones with out-of-sync audio may be better than nothing. And if lecture webcasts do become a reality, would that be the result of the industrial push of trendy technologies — such as the iTunes U or video podcasts, or the outcome of papers in leading conferences and transactions?

Without much fanfare, we just switched to our new web site, powered by WordPress, and with the objective of making the site more dynamic, with more frequent updates and more interesting content. The site is designed to be a combination of weblogs and static web pages: weblogs for posts by team members in a particular context of time, and web pages for content that spans a longer period.

Though that may be the official line, I somehow feel that the weblog section may eventually just become my personal blog dedicated to research, while the static web pages would include the list of publications for download. We will see how it works out, but at least I realized one thing a long time ago: there is no way a web site can be perfect. I would rather be in pursuit of perfection one post (or one paper) at a time.