Prof. Farzad Safaei
Title: The challenge of immersive multimedia communication for
networked games
Biography: Farzad Safaei graduated from the University of Western
Australia with the degree of Bachelor of Engineering and obtained his PhD in
Telecommunications Engineering from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He
has more than 17 years of experience in conducting and managing advanced
research in the field of data communications and networks. Currently, he is the
Professor of Telecommunications Engineering and Director of Centre for Emerging
Networks and Applications at the University of Wollongong. He is also the
Program Manager of the Cooperative Research Centre for Smart Internet
Technology. Before joining the University of Wollongong, he was the Manager of
Internetworking Architecture and Services Section in Telstra Research
Laboratories (TRL).
In the last six years, his research focus has been on network support for
immersive and distributed virtual environments. A key aspect of this research
is large-scale delivery and real-time creation and processing of multimedia
content (such as voice and video of participants in a crowded virtual
environment) with judicious adaptation of the spatial location of computation
performed on multimedia streams. The application of this research on provision
of immersive voice communication capability for massively multiplayer network
games is currently being commercialised through a start-up company SpatialVoice
Corporation (www.spatialvoice.com).
Associate Prof. Wu-chang Feng
Title:What's Next for Networked Games?
Talk Description:
Computing and communication advances have made on-line games much more
functional and compelling, but also more complex and difficult to
develop. In this talk, we will examine some of the challenges in
networking, parallel and distributed systems, and security
that are being tackled by on-line game developers as technology has
improved with an eye on identifying research that might be useful
for our community to tackle.
Biography: Wu-chang Feng is currently an Associate Professor at the Intel
Systems and Networking Laboratory at Portland State University where
he works on projects in networking, security, and on-line games.
Besides running mshmro.com, one of the most popular game communities
in the Northwest, his gaming work includes cheat detection and
prevention, game server measurement and modeling, and the
characterization of global game workloads. As a result of playing
the research game, he 0wnz the 2003 IEEE Communications Society
William R. Bennett award, the 2002 IBM Research Best Paper Prize,
and the 2005 IMC Best Student Paper award.
