Guest Speaker: Bruce Devlin

Bruce Devlin has been working in the media industry for 30 years and is the chief media scientist at Dalet Digital Media Systems as well as the founder of Mr MXF Ltd. and co-founder of the Media Bay LLC. He is well known in the industry for his technology presentations, especially his educational YouTube series—Bruce’s Shorts. Devlin has designed everything from ASICs to algorithms. He tweets as @MrMXF chaired the SMPTE working groups and literally wrote the book on the MXF format. Devlin is an alumnus of Queens’ College Cambridge England. He is a member of the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers (IABM) and Digital Production Partnership, a fellow and U.K. Governor of SMPTE, a recipient of SMPTE’s David Sarnoff Medal, a recipient of BKSTS’ Achievement award, keen to educate the world about media and a rider of bicycles (occasionally quickly). Devlin is also a recipient of the SMPTE Excellence in Standards award.

Guest Speaker: Thomas Bause Mason

Thomas Bause Mason, whose extensive engineering experience includes the development of patented media technologies and in-depth involvement in standards creation while serving in roles with West German Television (WDR), Cologne Broadcasting Center (CBC), Ascent Media, and NBCUniversal in Los Angeles, is currently the owner and managing director of Open Media Consulting. While at NBCUniversal, he was the company’s lead on the Video Services Forum (VSF) TR03/TR04 and SMPTE ST 2110 standardization effort. Mason also has chaired the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) Media over IP (MoIP) Subcommittee; organized the MoIP Workshop — presented by the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), NABA, SMPTE, and VSF — that promoted the use of SMPTE ST 2110; and chaired the SMPTE Studio Group on Flow Management in Professional Media Networks.

Guest Speaker: Dave Siegler - Media Technology Consultant 

Dave Siegler is the former Vice President of Technical Operations for Cox Media Group (CMG); recently transitioning his deep experience as a Media Technology Executive to advance the television broadcasting and production industry. 

 As Vice President of Technical Operations, Siegler was responsible for leading and growing the integrated media company through the rapidly changing technologies and consumer demands. Specifically, he managed CMG’s Technical Operations groups to integrate new technologies and operational processes across multiple platforms for CMG’s 14 broadcast television stations, one local cable television station and 57 radio stations. 

 Prior to his current position, Siegler was Cox’s Director of Broadcast Operations & Engineering for the company’s television operations in Charlotte, NC and served five years as live events Engineering Manager at Turner Broadcasting and thirteen years in various positions with Post-Newsweek Television Stations (now Graham Media). 

 Dave is a Fellow Member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and is a recipient of Broadcasting & Cable’s Technology Leadership Award. 

 He is a member of the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers, Society of Broadcast Engineers, serves as ATSC Board member and as the Treasurer of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Broadcast Technology Society.   

Guest Speaker: Fred Walls  

Fred Walls has worked at Broadcom for more than 20 years, focusing on edge-based inference, video algorithms, and architectures for ASICs. He is recognized throughout the industry for his contributions to the VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC) standard, a lightweight video compression standard that has enjoyed widespread adoption in MIPI®, VESA DisplayPort, HDMI®, and other consumer electronic interfaces. He has authored 8 papers and is a named inventor on 29 issued patents. He co-chairs the SMPTE 31FS Technology Committee as well as the Joint ETC AI/ML Task Force, and he actively participates in a number of other standards organizations on behalf of Broadcom. 

Fred received his B.S. and M.Eng. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He enjoys volunteering with kids STEM activities and collects and repairs pinball machines. 

Guest Speaker: Yves Bergquist

Yves Bergquist is the Director of the “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), where his team is developing next-generation applications drawn from AI and neuroscience for the media and entertainment industry. ETC is funded by all 6 Hollywood studios, as well as technology companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Nagra, Technicolor, and Nielsen. 

Yves is also CEO of AI startup Corto, which is building a comprehensive knowledge engine to help media and entertainment companies develop deep, “genomics”-type insights into how their content resonates with audiences. Corto creates integrated insights across content and audience data using semantic knowledge representation and probabilistic evolutionary meta-learning to autonomously “breed” new generations of machine learning algorithms from hundreds of “parent” algorithms. Corto is in Alpha testing with a dozen media companies including Sony Music, Legendary Pictures, Nagra, Netflix, Microsoft, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and the Sundance Institute.  

 At ETC, Yves and his team manage a half dozen research and development projects applying advanced AI and neuroscience methods to the challenges facing the entertainment industry, including AI-driven content development, production, postproduction, and marketing. Their efforts include: using social media conversations to model audience decisions in the theatrical window, developing the first audience intelligence application focused on the Chinese market (“Gaosu”), correlating narrative structures in film to theatrical performance (“StoryCipher”), and a Deep Learning-driven semantic content classification application through vector embeddings (“film2vec”). Yves’ team is also working on applying machine intelligence to model algorithmic structures of narrative and “interestingness” in film and TV, as well as building neurobiological models of audience emotions using fMRI.