Biographical sketches of authors

Eric W. Brown   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: ewb@us.ibm.com). Dr. Brown is a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He earned his Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1996 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include performance issues in information retrieval systems, parallel and distributed text search, text categorization, question answering, and applications of automatic speech recognition to knowledge management problems. Dr. Brown has published a number of database and information retrieval papers and patents and is a member of the ACM.

Savitha Srinivasan   IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: savitha@almaden.ibm.com). Ms. Srinivasan is the manager of the Multimedia Knowledge Discovery group at IBM Almaden Research Center. She received an M.S. degree in computer science and joined the speech group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1990 as a speech applications researcher. She worked on the design and development of IBM's speech recognition products, such as the IBM Speech Server Series and Medspeak Radiology. She moved to IBM Almaden Research in 1997 and has since then been working on applications of speech recognition to multimedia indexing. She is the author of several publications and patents in speech recognition-related applications and multimedia information retrieval.

Anni Coden   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: anni@us.ibm.com). Dr. Coden is a research staff member at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Her most recent work is focused on applying speech recognition and text analysis to automatically analyze broadcast video and find relevant, collateral information. Her other recent activities include question answering and video indexing and search. Dr. Coden holds multiple patents in the areas of multimedia search technologies and speech technology. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981 and, after spending a year at MIT as a research scientist, joined IBM.

Dulce Ponceleon   IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: dulce@almaden.ibm.com). Dr. Ponceleon received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Stanford University. In 1991 she joined the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, where she worked on information retrieval, video and audio compression and technologies for QuickTime, and computer graphics. She was a key contributor to the first software-only video-conferencing system. In 1997 she joined IBM Almaden Research, where she has worked on video content analysis, video summarization, visualizations for video, multimedia indexing, and application of text analysis techniques and related technologies to automatic speech recognition transcripts. She has participated in the ISO MPEG-7 standardization efforts. She has numerous patents and publications in video and audio compression, information retrieval, multimedia indexing and retrieval, numerical linear algebra and nonlinear programming.

James W. Cooper   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: jwcnmr@us.ibm.com). Dr. Cooper is a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His interests include Java technology, object-oriented programming, design patterns, information retrieval and text mining technologies, and user interface design. Dr. Cooper is a columnist of JavaPro magazine and the author of 14 books; he holds several patents.

Arnon Amir   IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, California 95120 (electronic mail: arnon@almaden.ibm.com). Dr. Amir received his B.Sc. degree magna cum laude in electrical and computer engineering from the Ben Gurion University, Israel, in 1989, and the M.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees in computer science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. In 1997 he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center, where he is currently a research staff member in the USER group. His research interests include computer vision, video indexing and retrieval, eye gaze tracking, graph clustering, and spatial data structures. He is the author of more than 30 technical papers in journals and refereed conferences and has filed more than 10 patents. He was awarded the 1997–1998 Rothschild fellowship and is a member of the IEEE and of the ACM.