M EDIA T ECHNOLOGY WWW: It should just work! Applied research for the future! The research area media technology is the study and practice of storage, distribution and presentation of media including real-time media as audio, video, music and animations as well as non real-time media such as images, text, graphics and other data. The research area also includes computer based human interaction and other media related applications such as learning environments (both local and net-based), distributed team-work, telepresence, distributed computer simulations, games and context- aware systems. Storage of media includes technologies for efficient and practical storage of media including the research about media database indexing, searching and retrieval of media objects as well as knowledge representation. For efficient storage and distribution media coding is central. The Media Technology Research Group Distribution of media includes design of distributed applications as well as protocols for efficient network utilization during the distribution process. A central area is media scalability where different forms of distribution over heterogeneous networks are researched, where heterogeneous means both varying bandwidth as well as varying network types. The primary distribution form is utilizing the Internet Protocol but also interaction with other related distribution forms are included. Distribution also includes research into new forms of media exchange within groups of distributed users as well as the important aspects of information system security. Presentation of media includes how different forms of media are presented to the receiver. This includes various forms of user interfaces and presentation techniques as well as efficient technologies for computer based presentation. Presentation also includes research regarding alternative physical presentation forms such as wearable computing devices. Interaction includes how people can efficiently communicate using computers and computer networks where both synchronous as well as asynchronous communications are central. This subject includes natural language processing, computer vision and computer speech processing.

M EDIA T ECHNOLOGY The Media Technology research group at the Luleå University of Technology was founded 1995 and have until 2002 produced two PhDs, one Docent, and have currently 7 PhD students enrolled. The group has published a great number of publications in both international journals and at international conferences, received several best paper awards as well as several individual research prices. The group is today led by Dr. Peter Parnes together with Dr. Kåre Synnes. The research group believes strongly that research results should both consists of academic publications of high quality as well as industry near prototypes, i.e. prototypes that can actually be used. This approach led in 1998 to the creation of the company Marratech AB which now develops software for real-time interaction over the Internet. The research group has been part of several international EU research projects and has a long experience from working in very large research and development projects. Previous and current industry project partners include among others Telia, Ericsson, Frontec, Marratech, Teracom, Philips, Thomson, Dassault, Bertelsmann. Non-industry partners include Centre for Distance- spanning Technology, Centre for Distance-spanning Healthcare, Centre for Distance-spanning Media, Centre for Distance-spanning Learning, The Swedish Research Institute for Information Technology, UCL UK, KTH, and FramKom. The research group currently consists of: Dr. Peter Parnes, Assistant Professor and research leader Dr. Kåre. Synnes, Assistant Professor Tech.Lic. Roland Parviainen, Graduate Student Tech.Lic. Christer Åhlund, Graduate Student Jeremiah Scholl, Graduate Student Stefan Elf, Industry Graduate Student Johan Kristiansson, Graduate Student Mikael Drugge, Graduate Student Marcus Nilsson, Graduate Student Johnny Widén, MSc. Research Engineer Fredrik Johansson, BSc, Research Engineer Josef Hallberg, Research Engineer and soon Graduate Student Göran Öberg, Research Engineer Kristina Strandberg, Group administrator