The CS Department welcomes Prof. Maneesh Agrawala, Forest Baskett Professor of CS & Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University.

Agrawala will present a talk entitled "Making and Breaking Video" on Wednesday, March 20 at 12:00 PM in MUDD Hall 3rd Floor Seminar Room.

Abstract: Video has become a primary medium for communicating ideas, making sense of information and telling stories. It is central to making, establishing and conveying human cultures throughout the world. Whether it is a soap opera, broadcast news, cinematic film, or even viral YouTube clips, the most watched video is engaging and usually involves careful attention to production.

Technological advances have made it easy to capture video using our mobile devices. But the raw media rarely tells a compelling story. In the first part of this talk I'll present recent projects that aim to significantly reduce the effort required to edit and produce high-quality video. Our tools are designed to let storytellers specify high-level objectives and let the computer handle lower-level details in putting together the raw materials. In the second part of the talk I'll present our work on building tools for analyzing large collections of video. I'll show how we can extract trends and patterns from a collection of 10 years of 24-7 cable TV news coverage, and from a set of over 500 cinematic films covering the last 100 years.

Bio: Prof. Maneesh Agrawala is the Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University. He works on computer graphics, human computer interaction and visualization. His focus is on investigating how cognitive design principles can be used to improve the effectiveness of audio/visual media. The goals of this work are to discover the design principles and then instantiate them in both interactive and automated design tools. He received an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2006), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2007), a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2008), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), and an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award (2014).

Hosted by CS Prof. Jessica Hullman