Ken Wood

[This is essentially a copy of my old AT&T home page, so it's a little out of date, and some of the links may eventually become stale. I will try to update it sometime in the near future.]

Most recently, I was in charge of the Broadband Phone project at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge. We looked at commercial opportunities in the combined space of ultra-thin-client systems (such as VNC) and SIP-based media signalling. In the process, we had a lot of fun building, installing, and experimenting with a large network of cool devices.

Previously, I led the DART Project. In this project we investigated techniques for multimedia information retrieval, building upon the success of the Video Mail Retrieval project in which our lab participated. While the VMR project concentrated exclusively on indexing video by means of speech recognition on the soundtrack, the DART project advanced those techniques and combined them with new techniques for content-based image retrieval, video parsing, user-interface design, and database technology in order to index and retrieve from very large heterogeneous collections of multimedia data, including text, hypertext, still images, audio, and video. We built several near-commercial-grade systems based on these techniques, including:

• Shoebox, a tool for managing digital photographs based on their visual content and on spoken annotations
• AT&TV, a web-based system for recording, indexing, summarizing, browsing, and searching large volumes of digital video, in particular a rolling weekly 24/7 archive of the four main UK terrestrial television channels
• a music browser which allowed users to search and sort the tracks from several hundred albums based on automatically extracted audio footprints.

My publications are listed here.

When I first joined the lab, I worked primarily on distributed systems and mobile computing. In particular, I was heavily involved in our Virtual Network Computing initiative which, amongst other things, allows you to interact with your desktop computing session through a Java-compliant browser anywhere on the internet.

Early on, I also had a bit of fun integrating a weather station on the roof of our building to our local distributed systems infrastructure, so you can take a look at the current rooftop weather conditions in Cambridge if you'd like.

I came here via Harvard, Nortel, and most recently Oxford where I spent seven years (four as a doctoral student and three as a Fellow at University College) working on parallel simulation algorithms, concurrency theory, and applied formal methods for software engineering.