Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Silvia Pfeiffer
PERSONAL DETAILS
Address: 1 Colston Street Ryde NSW 2112 Australia
Phone: +61 2 8012 0937 (home) +61 401 38 40 41 (mobile) Email: [email protected]
PROFICIENCY IN LANGUAGES
German Mother Tongue English Fluent, 7 years at school, 6 months au-pair, 10 years in Australia French Acceptable, 7 years at school, no practice since
EDUCATION
1987-1993 “Wirtschaftsinformatik” studies (business management and computer science) at the University of Mannheim, Germany short-term jobs coding in SME companies Masters Degree (double degree) with excellent marks
1994-1999 PhD in Computer Science at the University of Mannheim at the Chair of Computer Networks and Multimedia Technology, Prof. Dr. W. Effelsberg PhD thesis on “Information Retrieval from the Digital Audio Tracks of Video” as Doctor of Science (Dr. rer. nat.), mark magna cum laude
PROFESSIONAL CAREER
July – Dec 2009 Mozilla Corporation Contract Contract to add basic subtitle/caption support for
Oct – Dec 2008 Mozilla Foundation Grant Grant to produce a study and recommendation on the current state of video accessibility for the Web.
July 2006 – now Vquence Pty Ltd CEO since July 2007: refocused business to providing competitive intelligence on video through video metrics and online engagement platform. CTO and Co-Founder: Start-up company in digital online media with technology in video search, and a mash-up application using either flash format video or Ogg Theora/Annodex. Also managed the server infrastructure. Pre-seed VC funding was provided by Information City Australia.
2004 – 2006 CSIRO ICT Centre, Marsfield: Research Group Leader of the Structured Media Project (former Networked Media group); managed up to 15 people, further developing the Annodex technology; Multimedia Science Leader for the ICT Centre, media spokes person; Digital Media Industry Focus Group convenor for the CeNTIE (Centre for networking technologies for the information economy) project, sponsored by national government Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA).
1999 – 2004 CSIRO-MIS, North Ryde: Research Group Leader of the Continuous Media Web group from 2001; focus on the development of Annodex Research Group Leader of the Analytic Audio Systems group from 2000; automated audio content analysis research and application development PostDoc position as Research Scientist; research and development of algorithms and applications for automatic content analysis of compressed, digital, audio-visual data streams in the Digital Media Information Systems group
1994 – 1999 University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany: PhD student working on audio- visual content analysis and new applications of digital media; Assistant of Prof. Dr. W. Effelsberg at the Chair for Computer Networks and Multimedia Technology; teaching responsibilities
1993 – 1994 Andersen Consulting (now: Accenture), Frankfurt, Germany: Assistant Consultant; design, implementation und management of Lotus Notes databases in the Opportunity Management Centre
1987 – 1993 Diverse Contracts: with SMEs on programming jobs, and as student assistant at several chairs during studies of “Wirtschaftsinformatik” (business management and computer science) at the University of Mannheim
MEMBERSHIPS AND AWARDS
Member of ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communication Society, SMPTE, Gesellschaft für Informatik (German Computer Society), Australian Unix User Group, Linux Australia, Sydney Linux User Group, Xiph.Org Foundation, Annodex Foundation, Pearcey Foundation.
Technical program committee member of the ACM Multimedia conference, IEEE Multimedia conference and Expo, IEEE Multimedia Modelling conference, SPIE conferences, Linux.conf.au, FOMS workshop and several more conference and workshop committee members.
Jan 2007, 2008, Key organiser of “Foundations of Open Media Software” ,2009, 2010 http://www.foms-workshop.org/, Workshop of open media software developers, Australia/New Zealand.
2007 – 2009 Elected & Re-elected President of the Annodex Association.
Jan 2007 Key organiser of Video Recordings for Australian Linux Conference, http://linux.conf.au/, one of the key open source software conferences
2006 Elected Secretary of the Annodex Association; taken the Association from an idea to incorporation
2006, 2007 Elected & Re-elected Vice-President of Sydney Linux User Group
2006 Silvia Pfeiffer & Conrad Parker receive CSIRO ICT Centre Innovation Award for their Annodex work
2006 Supervisor in Google Summer of Code program to extend existing open media software to create & play Annodex
2005 Final round at the EUREKA awards with the Annodex work
2005 Highly commended for the Pearcey Award for the Annodex work
2005 Best paper award at the Multimedia Modelling Conference
2003 Silvia Pfeiffer’s CMWeb Team receives the CMIS Divisional Chief’s Innovation Award
SOFTWARE SYSTEMS
1988 - 1992 Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall, building & loan society: design, implementation and introduction of a new system for the management of advertisements for the company's client magazine Mosaik in dBase.
1989 - 1993 Dr. Scholz & Partner, sewage plant construction and turnkey construction: design, implementation and introduction of a enterprise administration system in dBase.
1993 – 1994 Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), consulting & technology: design, implementation and introduction of a system to administrate opportunities, contracts, staff CVs in the Opportunity Management Centre in Lotus Notes.
1994 – 1999 University of Mannheim, Chair of Praktische Informatik IV: design and implementation of a toolbox for audio analysis research in C and C++, and of the MoCA workbench in tcl/tk in the Movie Content Analysis Project; development of algorithms and research prototypes to experimentally validate ideas.
1999 – 2000 CSIRO – MIS (Mathamtical and Information Systems): design and implementation of a system for the semi-automatic creation of subtitles for videos called CaTe (Captioning Templates) in C, C++, and Microsoft MFC.
1999 – 2000 CSIRO – MIS: design and implementation of an open source toolkit for automatic analysis of MPEG-compressed audio streams called MPEG Maaate in C++, as well as direction of a colleague in the implementation of a visualisation software for MPEG Maaate in C called bewdy.
2000 – now CSIRO: team leader; design, standardisation and implementation of the Continuous Media Web technology (see http://www.annodex.net/) in a team of three, comprising * sw libraries (Annodex, CMML, Xiph codecs handlers) in C, * a media server (Apache module) in C, * media middleware (VideoLan, xine, and DirectShow support) in C und C++, * an annodex video search engine(Panoptic module) in C, * a stand-alone browser demo on Mac OS X in Objective C, * an operating system independent Firefox browser plugin in XUL, CSS, RDF, using VideoLAN, * an ActiveX control to allow Annodex to be played in Internet Explorer, * a mobile phone video search and playback application (Aida) in C++ for Symbian, and * an authoring application (AnxCreator) in C++ and C# for Windows. * a wiki for video (CMMLWiki) in python, using MySQL and scriptaculous together with the python bindings of Annodex. * creation of server infrastructure using Xen and debian
Aside from leading the team., Silvia implemented and is the maintainer of libcmml, implemented the first prototype of mod_annodex, and wrote all of the specification documents published as Internet-Drafts.
2006 - 2007 Vquence CTO; design & implementation of search engine, and Web application demonstrator using Adobe Flash in collaboration with contractors. Creation and support of server infrastructure as well as implementation of software. The prototype backend was written in C#, the Web frontend in php and AJAX and used Cortado. We later moved the backend to Java and the Web frontend to Ruby on Rails. The server infrastructure runs on Ubuntu and uses Apache, MySQL, and Mongrel to deliver the service. Silvia’s implementation focus was on the Web frontend, but she managed the overall project.
2007 – 2008 Vquence CEO; design & implementation of the new VQmetrics user interface in Ruby on Rails, AJAX and MySQL. Input into the design of the backend crawling technology.
EXAMPLES OF IMPLEMENTED SOFTWARE SYSTEMS BY THE ANNODEX TEAM
`Video Search Video Browsing
CSIRO‘s Firefox Plugin for Annodex Authoring Software
CSIRO‘s Panoptic Search Engine extended with deep video search (in 2002)
CSIRO‘s AnxCreator for the creation of Annodex CSIRO’s Annodex browser for mobile phones
search for clips video browsing clip list PUBLICATIONS
MASTER’S THESIS S. Pfeiffer. Codegenerierung aus Estelle-Spezifikationen für einen Parallelrechner, Universität Mannheim, 1993 (approx. 80 Pages)
PHD THESIS S. Pfeiffer. Information Retrieval aus digitalisierten Audiospuren von Filmen, Dissertation, Universität Mannheim, Veröffentlichung als Buch im Shaker Verlag, 1999. (approx. 250 Pages)
REFEREED SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
BOOK CHAPTERS S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, A. Pang ―Continuous Media Web: Hyperlinking, Search & Retrieval of Time-Continuous Data on the Web‖, In ―Managing Multimedia Semantics‖ U. Srinivasan & S. Nepal (eds), IDEA Group Inc., pp.160-181, 2005. (25 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Schremmer ―Automated Annodexing of Meeting Recordings‖ In ―MultiMedia Information Retrieval – Methodologie ed esperienze internazionali di content-based retrieval per l‘informatzione e la documentazione‖, R. Raieli and P. Innocenti (eds), AIDA Assoziazione Italiana per la Documentazione Avanzata, pp. 347-368, Rome, 2004. (20 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, U. Srinivasan ―Scene Determination Using Auditive Segmentation‖ In Media Computing – Computational Media Aesthetics, C. Dorai and S. Venkatesh (eds), Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 105-130, 2002. (25 Pages)
Pfeiffer, S.; Lienhart, R.; Kühne, G.; Effelsberg, W. "The MoCA Project - Movie Content Analysis Research at the University of Mannheim" in J. Dassow, R. Kruse (Hg.) "Informatik '98: Informatik zwischen Bild und Sprache", 28. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik, Magdeburg, 21.-25. September 1998, Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 329-338, 1998.
Lienhart, R.; Pfeiffer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "Automatic Trailer Production" In Handbook of Multimedia Computing, B. Furht (ed), CRC Press, pp. 361-378, 1998.
JOURNAL ARTICLES S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, A. Pang ―The Continuous Media Web: A Distributed Multimedia Information Retrieval Architecture Extending the World Wide Web‖, ACM Multimedia Systems Journal 2005, Volume 10, Number 6 / October, 2005. (15 Pages)
U. Srinivasan, S. Pfeiffer, S. Nepal, M. Lee, L. Gu, S. Barrass ―A Survey of MPEG-1 Audio, Video and Semantic Analysis Techniques‖, Kluwer‘s Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, Volume 27 , Issue 1 (September 2005), pp. 105 - 141.
C. Parker and S. Pfeiffer ―Video Blogging: Content to the Max‖, IEEE MultiMedia Magazine, IEEE Computer Society, No. 2, April-June 2005, pp. 2-6 (5 Pages).
Pfeiffer, S.; Lienhart R.; Effelsberg, W. "Scene Determination based on Video and Audio Features" Kluwer‘s Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, No. 15, pp. 59-81, 2001.
Lienhart, R.; Pfeiffer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "Video Abstracting" Communications of the ACM, Vol. 40, No. 12, pp.55-62, December 1997.
Pfeiffer, S.; Lienhart, R.; Fischer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "Abstracting Digital Movies" Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.345-353, December 1996.
CONFERENCE ARTICLES Silvia Pfeiffer, "Taking HTML5
Silvia Pfeiffer ―Video Accessibility for Ogg‖, Linux and Open Source Conference Australia, lca.conf.au, Multimedia Miniconf, 20th January 2009, Hobart, Tasmania, 2009.
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker ―Accessibility for the HTML5
Silvia Pfeiffer ―The importance of measurements of online video audiences to determine communication policy‖, Communications Policy & Research Forum, University of Technology Sydney, 29/30 September 2008.
Silvia Pfeiffer, John Ferlito ―Metavidwiki: when you need a web video solution‖, Open Source Developers Conference OSDC, 2-5 December 2008, Sydney, 2008.
Silvia Pfeiffer ―An Open Source ‗YouTube‖, Open Source Developers Conference OSDC, 2-5 December 2008, Sydney, 2008.
Silvia Pfeiffer (Annodex Association), ―Architecture of a Video Web - Experience with Annodex―, W3C Video on the Web Workshop 12-13 December 2007, San Jose, California and Brussels, Belgium.
Silvia Pfeiffer (Annodex Association), ―Hyperlinking to time offsets: The temporal URI specification―, W3C Video on the Web Workshop 12-13 December 2007, San Jose, California and Brussels, Belgium.
C. Schremmer, S. Hansen, S. Pfeiffer, F. Mueller, ―Analysis of Human Interactions for the Design of a Virtual Post Production Office - Facilitating remote creative collaboration in the post production industry‖. In Proc. CSIRO ICT Centre Conference 2005.
C. Schremmer, S. Pfeiffer ―Meta Data Extraction from Linguistic Meeting Transcripts for the Annodex File Format‖, Multimedia Modelling conference, Australia 2005, Melbourne Australia, pp. 405 – 412, January 2005 (best paper award, 9 Pages)
C. Schremmer, S.Pfeiffer, P. Subotic and E. Chang ―Enhancement of Teleconferencing Audio – Meta Information Extraction from Meeting Recordings‖, Proc. 1st CSIRO ICT Centre Conference (CICTC), Sydney, Australia, 25th - 26th October 2004.
C. Parker, A. Pang, S. Pfeiffer ―Demonstrating a Video and Audio Web‖, Proc. ACM Multimedia conference 2004, New York, pp. 168 – 171, October 2004. (2 Pages, demo)
A. Pang, C. Parker, S. Pfeiffer ―Challenges of Networked Media: Marrying the Navigational Paradigms of Browsing Histories and Media Playlists‖, Proc. ACM Multimedia Conference 2004, pp. 480 – 483, New York, October 2004. (4 Pages)
C. Schremmer, S. Cassidy, S. Pfeiffer ―Audio Metadata Generation for the Continuous Media Web‖, AES 25th Intl. Conference, June 17-19, pp 288 – 295, 2004. (8 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, C. Schremmer ―Annodex: A Simple Architecture to Enable Hyperlinking, Search & Retrieval of Time-Continuous Data on the Web‖, ACM Multimedia Conference, 5th Intl. Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR 2003), Berkeley, Nov 2003. (7 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer ―Ogg Technologies: Open source first, open standards next‖, AUUG (Australian Unix User Group) Annual Conference 2003 on Open Standards, Open Source, Open Computing, 3rd – 5th September 2003, Sydney. (8 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, T. Vincent ―Survey of compressed domain audio features and their expressiveness‖, SPIE Conference on Storage and Retrieval for Media Databases (EI24), San Francisco, 2003. (8 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer ―Pause concepts for audio segmentation at different semantic levels‖, ACM Multimedia conference, Ottawa, Canada, 2001. (7 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker ―bewdy, Maaate!‖, Australian LINUX Conference, Sydney, Australia, 2001. (8 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, U. Srinivasan ―TV anytime as an application scenario for MPEG-7‖, Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 2000, Marina del Ray, Calif.., 2000. (4 Pages)
Pfeiffer, S.; Robert-Ribes, J.; Kim, D. "Audio Content Extraction from MPEG-encoded sequences" To be published in: First International Workshop on Intelligent Multimedia Computing and Networking, IMMCN 2000, a constituent of Fifth Joint Conference on Information Sciences, JCIS 2000, Atlantic City, New Jersey, February 27 to March 3, 2000.
Robert-Ribes, J.; Pfeiffer, S.; Ellison, R.; Burnham, D. "Semi-automatic captioning of TV programs, an Australian perspective" Workshop on TV Closed Captions for the hearing impaired people. Telecommunication Advancement Organisation Japan, November 1999.
Pfeiffer, S. "The importance of perceptive adaptation of sound features in audio content processing" SPIE Storage and Retrieval for Image and Video Databases VII, January 1999, San Jose, CA, pp. 328-337.
Pfeiffer, S.; Lienhart R.; Effelsberg, W. "Scene Determination based on Video and Audio Features" IEEE IEEE Conference on Multimedia Computing & Systems, 1999, Italy.
Lienhart, R.; Pfeiffer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "The MoCA Workbench: Support for Creativity in Movie Content Analysis" IEEE Conference on Multimedia Computing & Systems, June 1996, Hiroshima, Japan, pp. 314-321.
Pfeiffer, S.; Fischer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "Automatic Audio Content Analysis" ACM Multimedia 96, November 1996, Boston, pp. 21-30.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
STANDARDS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO STANDARDS
I. Goncalves, S. Pfeiffer, C. Montgomery, ―Ogg Media Types‖, RFC 5334, IETF, September 2008. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5334.txt (13 pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, and A. Pang. The Annodex annotation format for time-continuous bitstreams, Version 3.0. Internet Draft (Work in Progress), Internet Engineering Task Force, Feb. 2005. http://www.ietf.org/internet- drafts/draft-pfeiffer-annodex-02.txt (35 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, and A. Pang. The Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML), Version 2.0. Internet Draft (Work in Progress), Internet Engineering Task Force, Feb. 2005. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft- pfeiffer-cmml-02.txt (46 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker, and A. Pang. Specifying time intervals in URI queries and fragments of time-based Web resources (BCP). Internet Draft (Work in Progress), Internet Engineering Task Force, Feb. 2005. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-pfeiffer-temporal-fragments-03.txt (22 Pages)
S. Pfeiffer. The Ogg Encapsulation Format Version 0. RFC 3533, Internet Engineering Task Force, May 2003. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3533.txt (15 Pages)
Amielh, M.; Wan, E.; Burnett, I.; Drury, G.; Pfeiffer, S.; Schremmer, C. " M10085: Generic syntax for an addressing scheme dedicated to non-XML documents " Internal Input Document to the 66th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, October 2003. (18 Pages)
Herre, J.; Klefenz, F.; Feiten, B.; Pfeiffer, S. "N3494: Workplan for MPEG-7 silence core experiment", Public Output Document of the 54th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, La Baule, France, October 2000. (2 Pages)
Pfeiffer, S. ―N3240: Workplan for MPEG-7 silence detection core experiment‖, Public Output Document of the 51st MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, March 2000. (2 Pages)
De Cheveigne, A.; Pfeiffer, S.; Casey, M. ―N3242: Framework for MPEG-7 audio descriptors‖, Public Output Document of the 51st MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, March 2000. (30 Pages)
Purnhagen, H.; Pfeiffer, S. "N 3084: MPEG Audio FAQ Update", Public Output Document of the 50th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, Maui, December 1999. (22 Pages)
Pfeiffer, S.; Casey, M. "N 3078: Framework for MPEG-7 Audio Descriptors", Public Output Document of the 50th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, Maui, December 1999. (25 Pages)
Pfeiffer, S. "M 5408: Obvious Audio Ds/DSs" Internal Input Document to the 50th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, December 1999.
Purnhagen, H.; Pfeiffer, S. "M 5532: MPEG Audio FAQ Update" Internal Input Document to the 50th MPEG Meeting, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, December 1999.
PATENTS & TRADEMARKS S. Pfeiffer & the CSIRO, Australian Trademark Application No. 953347, Trademark on ―ANNODEX‖, filed 9th May 2003, accepted 23rd Dec 2004 Australia-wide, in progress in US.
S. Pfeiffer & the CSIRO, Australian Trademark Application No. 1038622, Trademark on ―AIDA‖, filed 24th Jan. 2005.
A. Pang, C. Parker, S. Pfeiffer ―Integrated Browsing Histories and Media Play Lists in a Media Browser‖, Provisional Patent, filed 20th July 2004.
S. Pfeiffer ―Video Search Engine and Methods‖, Vquence Patent, filed 22nd Dec July 2006.
TECHNICAL REPORTS C. Schremmer, S. Pfeiffer, A. Krumm-Heller, F. Mueller, ―Real or Virtual? — Design Reflections on a Remote Collaborative Information Space for Creative People‖, CSIRO-ICT Centre Nr 2006/136, 2006.
C. Schremmer, S. Pfeiffer, A. Krumm-Heller, F. Mueller, ‖Design Reflections for the Creation of a Collaborative Information Space to Connect Creative People over a Distance‖, CSIRO-ICT Centre Nr 2005/338, 2005.
M. Lee, S. Pfeiffer ―Evaluation Tests of Motion-JPEG2000 and Its Scalability Functionalities‖, CSIRO-ICT Centre Nr. 2005/008, 2005.
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker ―Architectural Overview of the Continuous Media Web‖, CSIRO-MIS Nr. 2002/02, Report for Apple Computer Inc., Commercial in Confidence, 2002.
S. Kudras, S. Pfeiffer ―Experiments on musicness‖, CSIRO-MIS Nr. 116/2002, 2002.
S.Pfeiffer ―Investigation into loud advertisements on television―, Submission to ABA (Australian Broadcasting Authority) to the investigation, 26. März 2002.
S. Pfeiffer, T. Vincent ―Formalisation of MPEG-1 Compressed Domain Audio Features‖ CSIRO-MIS Nr. 01/196, 2001.
S. Pfeiffer ―Intelligent Pause Detection‖, Technical Report CSIRO-MIS Nr, 2001/11, 2001.
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker ―Audio Metadata Feasibility Study‖, CSIRO-MIS Nr. 2001/31, Report for Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CISRA), 2001.
S. Pfeiffer, C. Parker ―A Toolkit and GUI for the Analysis of MPEG Compressed Audio Files, CSIRO-MIS Nr. 2000/169, 2000.
S. Pfeiffer ―Calculation of Captioning Templates‖, Technical Report CSIRO-MIS Nr. 2000/159, Commercial in Confidence, 2000.
Lienhart, R.; Pfeiffer, S.; Fischer, S. "Automatic Movie Abstracting" Technical Report at the University of Mannheim, July 1997.
Tomczyk, P.; Pfeiffer, S.; Effelsberg, W. "A new object oriented analysis technique for the development of audio analysis algorithms " (in German) Technical Report at the University of Mannheim, March 1999.