Francesca De Simone

francesca.desimone@epfl.ch

Biography

Francesca De Simone was born in Rome, Italy, on May 21st, 1983. She received her M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from the Università degli Studi Roma TRE, Rome, Italy, in December 2006. From August 2006 until November 2006 she was research assistant in the Institute of Signal Processing of Tampere University of Technology (TUT), in Tampere, Finland, working on error concealment technique for video transmission over Digital Video Broadcasting Handheld (DVB-H) channel. She performed her M.Sc thesis project on Video Quality Assessment and Error concealment for DVB-H System. From January to March 2007 she worked as IT consultant in Rome, in H3G Italy, focusing on test activity for DVB-H phones. Since May 2007 she is research assistant in Professor Ebrahimi’s MultiMedia Signal Processing group at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. Since March 2008, she is pursing her PhD thesis under the guidance of Prof. Ebrahimi.

Her research interests include subjective visual quality assessment, Full-Reference, Reduced-Reference and No-Reference objective image and video quality metrics, Quality of Experience in multimedia communication. She has been involved in the CTI A-VISION project on Advanced Videoconferencing Service over IP-cOnverging Networks, in the K-SPACE Network of Excellence (http://www.k-space.eu/)and in VISNET II Network of Excellence (http://www.visnet-noe.org/). She is currently involved in the NCCR IM2 network (Swiss National Center of Competence in Research on Interactive Multimodal Information Management, http://www.im2.ch/), in the Network of Excellence PetaMedia (http://www.petamedia.eu/) and in the Euro NF Network of Excellence on Haptic enablers for improved QoE, bandwidth and energy consumption (http://www.univie.ac.at/hapqnet/). She has been involved in several industrial projects, like the Microsoft JPEG-XR performance evaluation project (1 year project carried out during 2008) and the ongoing iCelero project on Internet acceleration for video streaming over 3G networks.

Francesca won the “Accenture Master of Science Award 2006/2007” for the results achieved during her Master of Science at Università degli Studi Roma TRE and the “QoMEX 2009 Qualcomm Best Student Paper Award” for the paper “Subjective assessment of H.264/AVC video sequences transmitted over a noisy channel”.