The SMPTE Sum-Up-May-9-2023

Welcome to the SMPTE Sum-Up, the weekly publication that details the recent and current events of your favorite standards development organization. This week at SMPTE:

SMPTE recently joined forces with OSA, making it part of our RIS initiative. Adding more acronyms to any organization is bound to make it more efficient, and that’s exactly why we’re excited about this new partnership. Not only will OSA help RIS become more transparent and productive, but people torn between joining OSA and SMPTE will no longer have to choose. Joining one organization means you’ll be joining both organizations. Current SMPTE members will become OSA members and visa versa.

Speaking of RIS, John J. Gallagher and the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY are officially sponsors of the SMPTE initiative. Gallagher is the Director of Technology: Admin Organization and Business Effectiveness at BMCC CUNY, and is a dedicated member of the SMPTE New York Section, which recently held a zoom meeting for students and young professionals seeking to enter the entertainment industry. SMPTE has been ramping up efforts to increase the engineering talent pool so the industry can continue to thrive and because the world has too many influencers who could be doing other things.

Last week, SMPTE streamed the webcast, “Generative AI in Media: Who Will Win, Who Will Lose?” The webcast was a tremendous success and detailed the potential benefits, and potential dangers, of Generative AI. Though many media personalities see the dangers of AI through the lens of the Terminator franchise, Yves Bergquist, the AI researcher who hosted the webcast, painted a much more realistic picture of Machine Learning. You can watch the webcast on our website right this very minute!

For all the standards fans out there, we have good news concerning the SMPTE website. The Standards Current Project Progress page has a received an upgrade. Where once the progress data had to be input by hand, the page now updates automatically every night at 2AM. No longer will you have to sit at your computer for days on end, refreshing the page until it finally updates. Now progress data comes to you daily, which is good considering five new standards documents are available for public consumption.

Lastly, check out our story about Standards VP Sally Hattori this week. In office since the first of the year, we are excited to share more about her! Sally is currently the Director of Product Development at StudioLAB, the creative innovation team at Disney. She has a ton of experience in the field, even winning the 2015 International Standard Development Award for her work on ISO/ICE 14496-10. We’re excited to be working with her.

That’s it for this week’s SMPTE Sum-Up. For more information on past and current events, standards projects, and webcasts, visit our website. See you next week!