The IUA would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Trinity College lecturer, Dr Anil Kokaram, on winning an Academy Award for the development of visual effects software for the film industry at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science ceremony in Los Angeles recently.
Dr Anil Kokaram who worked as consultant with the UK-based software developer, the Foundry, was awarded with the Academy Award at the Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony which took place on Saturday, February 10th, a fortnight ahead of the acting awards on February 25th.
The TCD lecturer along with three members of the Foundry software development team received the Scientific and Engineering Award for their role in the design and development of an integrated suite of software visual effects in motion pictures. The visual effects and image-processing software developed by Dr Kokaram and the team have been used on a host of high-profile feature films including Casino Royale, X-Men, The Last Stand, The Da Vinci Code and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Anil was also the recipient of an FP6Marie Curie funding contract worth €95,000. The Sigmedia Laboratory had successfully applied to the Marie Curie Programme since 2000. They have been funded through both the Research Training Network and Transfer of Knowledge Programme. Under the RTN scheme, the MOUMIR project (Models for Unified Multimedia Information Retrieval) investigated new ways of searching digital media content. The idea was to extract audio and visual features such as loudness, pitch, shape, colour and combine them to create summaries of content, or to allow users to query content in a way that they had never been able to before. Their publications and demonstrations can be seen at www.moumir.org. Sigmedia coordinated Moumir valued at 1.5million over 4 years between 2000 and 2004. One aspect of their work that led to good publicity in the New Scientist and RTE television was the automated creation of sports highlights. Anil felt that Marie Curie funding filled a gap left by other forms of research funding in that research travel is encouraged and well financed in this programme. Through the Marie Curie programme, Sigmedia has been able to provide a kick start to the industrial research careers of its graduates, is able to attend all the international conferences in film and video processing, and has been able to employ post-doctoral researchers regularly over the last 6 years.
According to Anil, the explosion in the availability and ease of generation of digital media has not been balanced by a similar increase in the ease with which that media is manipulated or accessed. Several of the latest blockbuster movies including Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and The X-Men etc use technology heavily influenced by work in Sigmedia.