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Speaker:        Dr. Francis C.M. Lau
                Head
                Department of Computer Science & Information Systems
                The University of Hong Kong

Topic:          "An Approach to Content Adaptation for Mobile Computing"

Date:           Monday, 18 November 2002

Time:           4:00 pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F
                (Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater, near lift nos. 25/26)
                HKUST


ABSTRACT:

We discuss the challenges for building a good content adaptation service
for mobile devices, and propose a decision engine with QoS awareness that
can automatically negotiate for the appropriate adaptation strategies to
use to produce an optimal adapted version. The decision engine will look
for the best tradeoff among various parameters in order to reduce the loss
of quality in various domains. The engine's decisions are used as a key
input in the production of the actual content version to be returned to
the device. We then propose a method that can find the optimal tradeoff
point between transcoding overhead (CPU cost) and storage needed for the
various preprocessed content variants (I/O cost). The method selectively
preadapts a subset of content variants and leaves the generation of the
residue to dynamic content adaptation with this preadapted subset as an
input. We have built a prototype document adaptation system for PDF
documents to demonstrate the viability of our approach.



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Biography:

Francis Lau received a PhD in computer science from Waterloo in 1986. He
joined the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, The
University of Hong Kong in 1987, where he is now the head of department.
He is an active member of the IEEE Computer Society. He pioneered the
society's Distinguished Visitors Program for Asia/Pacific in 1993. He
served on the society's board of governors in 1998, as a member-at-large
of the Publications Board, and then as vice president for chapter's
activities in 1999. He is a member of the society's Technical Activities
Board, in charge of Asian technical activities, and was a core member of
the ACM-IEEE/CS Joint Task Force on Curriculum 2001. He received a Golden
Core recognition in 1998 and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000 for
outstanding achievements and contributions to the IEEE Computer Society.
He is a member of the engineering panel of the Hong Kong Research Grant
Council, and a member of the vetting committee of the Innovation and
Technology Fund. His research interests include operating systems,
parallel and distributed computing, mobile and pervasive computing,
Internet and the web. He has written many journals and conference papers,
and is a co-author (with Dr. C.Z. Xu) of the book, Load Balancing in
Parallel Computers, published by Kluwer Academic Press.



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