Dr. Gerald Friedland is a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a private research lab affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, where he leads a multimedia group, mostly focussing on acoustic techniques such as speaker diarization and acoustic event detection. He is currently PI on an IARPA-funded project on video concept detection, a PI on a DARPA project on multimodal grounded learning for robots, a PI on an NSF project on the human accuracy of location estimation, a PI on an industry-funded project on video duplicate detection using acoustic methods, and co-PI on an NSF project on the privacy implications of global inference.
He is also a member of the Executive Advisory Board of UC Berkeley’s Opencast project. Until 2009 he was site manager in the EU-funded project AMIDA and the Swiss-funded IM2 project, both of which explored multimedia meeting analysis. He was program co-chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2008 and 2009. He co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing and is a proud founder and program director of the IEEE International Summer School on Semantic Computing at UC Berkeley. He is also a program co-chiar of ICME 2012 and a program committee member of ACM Multimedia 2009, senior TPC member 2010, and Grand Challenge chair 2011.
Prior to this, he co-authored SIOX (Simple Interactive Object Extraction), which has become the open-source standard algorithm for interactive image cut and paste used in GIMP, Blender, and Inkscape. He was also one of the main developers of the E-Chalk software, a system to replace the traditional chalkboard with modern electronic means. As a result he is involved with the Berkeley Opencast lecture webcasting project and was a Google Summer of Code Mentor for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) in 2009.
Dr. Friedland has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in conferences, journals, and books and is currently authoring a new textbook on multimedia computing together with Dr. Ramesh Jain. He is associate editor for ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications and regulary reviews for IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Language Processing, IEEE Transaction on Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, Springer’s Machine Vision and Application, and other journals. He is the recipient of several research and industry recognitions, among them the European Academic Software Award and the Multimedia Entrepreneur Award by the German Federal Department of Economics. Most recently, he lead the team that won the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge in 2009. Dr. Friedland received his doctorate (summa cum laude) and master’s degree in computer science from Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, in 2002 and 2006, respectively.
