Curriculum Vitae
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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 <video> into Firefox for both out-of-band (i.e. separate text file) and in-line (i.e. a track inside Ogg Theora) captions, as well as work with the W3C to define extensions to HTML5 for video accessibility. 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