Review of multimedia (image, video and audio) source coding/compression techniques and standards (JPEG, MPEG, H26x); Review of communication and networking architectures and IP networks; QoS, delay, jitter, rate control, scheduling, and traffic engineering for real-time multimedia delivery; Reliability, error control, error concealment and resilience techniques; Streaming media and real-time communication techniques and protocols, RTP/RTCP, IntServ, DiffServ, MPLS; Transmission of multimedia over Internet, wireless channels, mobile cellular networks, GSM, 3G, 4G wireless systems, and satellite networks; Current and future applications of multimedia communications, e.g., voice-over-IP (VoIP), Internet Video conferencing, SIP, IMS, video-on-demand, digital video broadcasting systems, real-time delivery of 3DTV; Current state-of-the-art and future visions in multimedia communications research.

Introduction to distributed computing, overview of operating systems, process synchronization and deadlocks, threads and thread synchronization, communication protocols, synchronization in distributed systems, management of time, causality, logical clocks, consistent global states, distributed mutual exclusion, distributed deadlock detection, election algorithms, agreement protocols, consensus, multicast communication, distributed transactions, replication, shared memory model, scheduling, distributed file systems, fault tolerance in distributed systems, distributed real-time systems.

Study of computational models of visual perception and their implementation in computer systems. Topics include: image formation; edge, corner and boundary extraction, segmentation, matching, pattern recognition and classification techniques; 3-D Vision: projection geometry, camera calibration, shape from stereo/silhouette/shading, model-based 3D object recognition; color texture, radiometry and BDRF; motion analysis.

The principles and computational methods to study the biological data generated by genome sequencing, gene expressions, protein profiles, and metabolic fluxes. Application of arithmetic, algebraic, graph, pattern matching, sorting and searching algorithms and statistical tools to genome analysis. Applications of Bioinformatics to metabolic engineering, drug design, and biotechnology.

Fundamental concepts of concurrency, non-determinism, atomicity, race-conditions, synchronization, mutual exclusion. Overview of parallel architectures, multicores, distributed memory. Parallel programming models and languages, multithreaded, message passing, data driven, and data parallel programming. Design of parallel programs, decomposition, granularity, locality, communication, load balancing. Patterns for parallel programming, structural, computational, algorithm strategy, concurrent execution patterns. Performance modeling of parallel programs, sources of parallel overheads.

Entropy, Relative Entropy and Mutual Information; Asymptotic Equipartition Theory; Entropy Rates of a Stochastic Process; Data Compression; Kolmogorov Complexity; Channel Capacity; Differential Entropy; The Gaussian Channel; Maximum Entropy and Spectral Estimation; Rate Distortion Theory, Network Information Theory.

Review of multi-dimensional sampling theory, aliasing, and quantization, fundamentals of color, human visual system, 2-D Block transforms, DFT, DCT and wavelets. Image filtering, edge detection, enhancement, and restoration. Basic video file formats, resolutions, and bit rates for various digital video applications. Motion analysis and estimation using 2D and 3D models. Motion-compensated filtering methods for noise removal, de-interlacing, and resolution enhancement. Digital image and video compression methods and standards, including JPEG/JPEG2000 and MPEG-1/2 and 4. Content-based image and video indexing and MPEG-7.