Page type: faculty

Faculty Research Interests : Brian Smith; Brian Smith; bsmith@cs.cornell.edu; Xerox Professor of Computer Science; Ph.D., University Of California at Berkeley, 1994; Office: 4107B Upson Hall; Office phone: 607-255-1180; Office hours this semester: Tues & Thurs 3:00 to 4:00;Research Interests;Teaching;Selected Publications;Research Talks;Misc Links;Research Interests;My research goal is to make video a first class data type in our;computing environment. To this end, my research group,; Project Zeno,;is building technologies supporting the storage, communication, and;processing of continuous media data. In contrast to other commercial;and research approaches, which require specialized hardware, operating;systems, or networks to be usable, all of these technologies we are;designing fit into the current research environment. Our premise is;that the current hardware, software, and communication infrastructure;is sufficient to support research into continuous media systems and;applications. We are verifying this hypothesis by building working;systems.;Our research on storage systems is directed towards building the Zeno;distributed video file server. The Zeno architecture uses a network of;workstations connected by a generic local area network (e.g., an;ethernet), a common environment in computing research laboratories.;Each workstation can act simultaneously as both a client and a server;of continuous media data. As a client, a workstation plays video;stored on one or more servers. As a server, a workstation is a file;server for video data. Each client can receive video stored at several;servers, and each server can service several clients. Compared with;large centralized servers, the advantages of this design are:; Scalability. As new clients are added, new servers are; automatically added.; Load balancing. The load generated by serving videos is distributed; both across machines and across networks (in the case where the; servers are located on different networks).; Low initial investment. By utilizing existing infrastructure, the; Zeno architecture promotes early adoption in research environments; with almost no initial investment.;Our research on communication systems is centered around best effort;delivery protocols. Such protocols are built on existing network;protocols and, in contrast to many other research efforts, do not need;to reserve network resources to establish a connection. Resource;reservation protocols are well suited to the national communication;infrastructure where users can be charged on a per call basis for;bandwidth and connections, but are poorly suited to network;environments where the network is a shared resource equally accessible;by all researchers. Our approach is appropriate for the latter;environments, commonly found in research laboratories. The;communication protocol we have developed, called Cyclic-UDP, is built;on top of the UDP datagram protocol, and is designed to transport audio;and video data in playback applications in local, metropolitan, and;wide area networks. Cyclic-UDP is used by the Zeno file server to;deliver audio and video data to clients. A; paper describing cyclic UDP is available;online , as well as the; slides from a research talk.;Our research on processing video data has been two-fold. First, we are;developing algorithms to process video data in the compressed;representation. Processing video without decompression leads to;dramatic speed-ups in processing performance since it both removes the;time-consuming processes of compression and decompression and reduces;the amount of data that must be processed. Experiments with an;implementation of these ideas on JPEG compressed image data indicates;that the data can be processed one to two orders of magnitude faster;than what was possible with previous approaches. We are currently;extending these ideas by parallelizing the algorithms using networks of;workstations and by developing a method for transcoding video in;software. In video transcoding, video is translated from one;compression format to another, a useful operation for video file;servers that must service heterogeneous clients.;A paper describing compressed;domain processing is available online.;Our research on video processing is also exploring methods to simplify;experimentation with video processing by developing a programming;language where video is a first class data type. This language, called;Rivl (pronounced "rival"), allows;video processing effects to be specified independent of the resolution;and format of the source material. The language does for video what;Postscript did for text and graphics: it provides a resolution;independent method for specifying video processing. Thus, the same;program can process low quality QuickTime video very quickly while;editing decisions are made, and then be used to format a high quality;finished product off-line, in much the same way that Postscript can be;previewed on a workstation at low quality, then sent to a 2600 dpi;printer for camera ready copy.;A paper describing RVL;is available online.;A talk that reviews our research on;video processing, both compressed domain processing and Rivl,;is available online.;The common theme of all these efforts is to provide tools to make video;usable in our research environment.;A talk that reviews this research;is also available online.;Teaching;At Cornell University, I teach an undergraduate course (CS 314) on computer;architecture, and a graduate course (CS;631) on multimedia systems.;Selected Publications; Jonathan Swartz, Brian C. Smith;;A Resolution Independent Video Language; Proc. of the Third ACM International Conference on Multimedia, San; Francisco, CA, November 5-9, 1995. (An;; HTML version is also available).; Asif Ghias, Jonathan Logan, David Chamberlin, Brian C. Smith;;Query By Humming -- Large Musical Information; Retrieval in An Audio Database; Proc. of the Third ACM International Conference on Multimedia, San; Francisco, CA, November 5-9, 1995. (An HTML version is also available).; Peter Liu, Brian C. Smith, Lawrence A. Rowe; Tcl-DP Name Server,; Proc. of the 1995 Tcl/TK Workshop, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 1993.; Brian C. Smith,;;Cyclic-UDP: A Priority-Driven Best-Effort,;; Brian C. Smith,;Fast Software Processing of Motion JPEG Video,;Proc. of the Second ACM International Conference on Multimedia, San;Francisco, CA, October 15-20, 1994.; Lawrence A.Rowe, Ketan Patel, Brian C. Smith,;MPEG video in software: representation, transmission and playback,;IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging: Science & Technology, San Jose,;California, February, 1994.; Brian C. Smith, Lawrence A. Rowe, Stephen C. Yen;Tcl Distributed Programming,;Proc. of the 1993 Tcl/TK Workshop, Berkeley, CA, June 1993.; Ketan Patel, Brian C. Smith, and Lawrence A. Rowe,;Performance of a Software MPEG Video Decoder,;Proc. of the First ACM International;Conference on Multimedia, Anaheim, CA, August 1-6, 1993, pp 75-82.; Brian C. Smith, Lawrence A. Rowe,;A New Family of Algorithms for Manipulating Compressed Images,;IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, September, 1993.; Lawrence A. Rowe, Brian C. Smith,;Continuous Media Player,;Third International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support;for Digital Audio and Video, Nov. 12-13, 1992, San Diego, CA.;Selected Research Talks;; Distributed Multimedia System's Research at Cornell;; My most recent research;; A Resolution Independent Video Language,;; Talk at Xerox Webster Research Center, June 20, 1995;; A Best-Effort Transmission Protocol for Continuous Media Data;;; Computing with Video: Xerox Site Review, Nov 29, 1994;;; University of Minnesota Colloquium Talk, Feb 6, 1995;;Misc Links;;Multimedia Courses on the Web; The Art Work of Annette Hanna;; Tcl7.5/Tk4.1 Manual; MMCN96: Electronic Proceedings; CMT Documentation;The PriceWeb;