On October 29, 2019, the alumni from the Bay area had the opportunity to meet Professor Touradj Ebrahimi, EPFL, Head of Multimedia Signal Processing Group, and Convenor (Chairman) of JPEG Standardization Committee.

In this talk, Prof. Ebrahimi started with an overview of the design choices that led to the popular JPEG and JPEG 2000 image compression standards with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. He then discussed more recent image compression formats such as JPEG XR, JPEG XS, JPEG XT, and JPEG XL, along with motivations that led to their design and the added values they bring. The recent JPEG Pleno compression standard that allows efficient compression of new imaging modalities such as light field, point cloud, and holography is then discussed. Last but not least, the role of machine learning and in particular the impact of the paradigm shift from humans as consumers of images and video, to machines and computer vision systems, was be discussed, and emerging ideas on how to design image compression based on deep learning was presented.