BFOIT
The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in
Information Technology (BFOIT): BFOIT is an independent foundation
created to increase opportunities for under-represented minorities and
female students in the field of information technology.
COPE
Community of Practice Environment, or CoPE, is a project that is developing a system to support general users in utilizing the Internet for information sharing and collaboration. Additionally, the system is usable and customizable for non-technical users without aid from technical support personnel. The project is part of a broader goal to enable users without specific computing expertise to establish and maintain communities of practice and democratic governance in a web environment. In addition to the CoPE web site, there is a down-loadable version of the current alpha system, CoPES, on SourceForge.net.
Robust Video Compression
Researchers are studying the enhancement of a baseline MPEG system through the use of a distributed source coded auxiliary channel. Predictive video coding suffers significant quality degradation in the event of channel loss due to prediction mismatch between the encoder and decoder, also called "drift". In the system developed at ICSI, extra information is coded using a Wyner-Ziv framework and sent over a low-rate auxiliary channel as a second description of the predictively coded video. The erroneous predictive decoder reconstruction then serves as side-information for the auxiliary channel decoder to obtain a higher-quality reconstruction. This research is made possible through funding from QUALCOMM and is headed by Professor Kannan Ramachandran of UC Berkeley.
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