The IEEE Data Compression Conference takes place every year at the end of March in Snowbird, a ski resort near Salt Lake City, Utah. It is chaired by Jim Storer and Marty Cohn from Brandeis University and intends to gather researchers from various scientific communities working on compression, coding and data transmission problems. It is a remarkable fact that this conference equally attracts researchers and students from Information Theory, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments. It is also the only meeting dedicated to all types of data compression problems: lossy or lossless, image, sound, text, theory and applications.

This year's DCC issue confirms the increasing interest in several new research themes. One of them is the design of source coding methods for network or multiuser wireless transmission, based on information-theoretic schemes. Examples include source coding with side information (Wyner-Ziv), independent coding of correlated sources (Slepian-Wolf), multiple descriptions and robustness to erasures. Contributions on these themes provided both new theoretical results and practical algorithms.

The World Wide Web also generates a lot of new challenging problems, such as the compression of graphs for web pages indexing. Two papers dealt with this issue and provided specific solutions for coding this type of object. Schemes for XML pages coding and streaming thin client compression were also proposed.

Wim Sweldens' invited talk on geometry compression shedded some light on the problem of identifying a geometrical object's information content. He showed the compression gain obtained by carefully separating the vertices structure from the actual geometry of the object. No doubt this will give rise to numerous future developments.

Apart from those new subjects, we observe a continuous improvement of traditional image and text compression methods. The efforts in optimizing zerotree image coders, for instance, are continuing to bear their fruits, and empirical performance bounds are still being improved.

The conference program can be found on the Brandeis University website at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~dcc/#Program

Jean Cardinal, April 2001.

Jean Cardinal, FNRS Research Fellow / ULB / Belgium

http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~jcardin