Multimedia research (panel session): the grand challenges for the next decade

Philippe Agrain is Head of Sector “Software Technologies” in the European Commission Information Society Technologies R&D Programme. He was trained as a mathematician and theoretical scientis, and holds a Doctorat and the Habilitation a Diriger les Recherches from University of Paris 7. From 1972 to 1981, he worked in the software engineering research labs of various software companies. He was a research fellow at U.C.Berkeley in 1982. Since then, and before joining the European Commission in 1996, he headed research teams in the field of computer processing, indexing, retrieval and user interfaces for audiovisual media. He is the author of more than 60 technical and technology assessment papers.