Timothy C. Hoad

BAppSci (CompSci)(Hons), PhD.

Software Design Engineer at Microsoft.

Email address:
Phone:	+1 425 707 0485
Fax:
Mailing address:	C/- 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond WA 98052, USA.

About me

I'm a Software Design Engineer Lead at Microsoft, where I'm working in live.com captions. In web search, captions refers to the description of the web page that you get when you do a search. That includes the title of the page, the short text snippet, and any rich content (such as images or videos) that we show to help you decide whether or not to click.

Before starting on captions, I worked for three years on Image and Video search.

In a previous life, I was a senior research specialist at Telstra Research Laboratories. I was part of the Digital Content Management group, which was one of the research teams in the Interactive Media section of TRL. I was involved in several areas of research:

• Information Retrieval
• Content Management
• Digital Rights Management
• Automated Video Quality Assessment and Monitoring
• Video Metadata

I completed undergraduate studies in Computer Science in 1999, after which I completed an honours year, with my research on the subject of detecting plagiarised and versioned documents. I was awarded the School of Computer Science and Information Technology Prize for Academic Excellence for my honours thesis, entitled "Detecting similar documents on the World Wide Web" in 2000.

I completed my PhD at RMIT University, School of Computer Science and Information Technology. I conducted my research within the Search Engine Group at RMIT. I began my PhD in 2001 and my thesis was submitted for examination in May 2004, and the final submission was approved in December, 2004.

A relatively recent resume is available here.

PhD Research

The goal of my research was to develop techniques for quickly and accurately identifying "co-derivative" video in a collection. A pair of video clips are considered co-derivative if they are derived from the same original footage. Thus, the movie, "The Hulk", is not co-derivative with the original television series, "The Incredible Hulk", since no footage is shared. Conversely, the extended cinema version of the most recent Nike advertisement is co-derivative with the shorter television version.

Thesis citation

"Video data is distributed in many ways, including digital formats such as DVD and internet streaming. Owners of video content need to be able to identify copies of their content to prevent unauthorised use or piracy. Tim's research has provided the first practical algorithms for finding copies of video data even after the video has been altered or degraded. The best of these methods allows thousands of hours of data to be accurately searched in a few seconds."

Publications

The followup paper, entitled "Fast Video Matching with Signature Alignment", also co-authoured with Justin Zobel, won best paper at CSPRSC 2003.

The following papers have appeared in a refereed journal or conference. To get a copy of a paper where the full text is not available through the web site, email me with the title you are interested in.

PhD Thesis

• "Video representations for effective retrieval from large collections", T.C. Hoad, PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, 2004.

Journal Articles

• "Indexed search for fast video matching in large collections", T.C. Hoad and J. Zobel, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP), To Appear.
• "Detection of video sequences using compact signatures ", T.C. Hoad and J. Zobel, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 24(1):1-50, January 2006.
• "Methods for identifying versioned and plagiarised documents", T.C. Hoad and J. Zobel, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 54(3):203-215, February 2003.

Conference Papers

• "Fast video matching with signature alignment", T.C. Hoad and J. Zobel, ACM SIGMM International workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, November, 2003, pp. 262-269.
• "Video similarity detection for digital rights management", T.C. Hoad and J. Zobel, Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Conference, Adelaide, Australia, February, 2003, pp. 237-245.

Patents

• "Content delivery system and player", T.C. Hoad and S.S. Spicer, Telstra Corporation Limited, Australian Pat No. 2004903438.

Affiliations

I am a member of the following organisations.

• ACM
• IEEE (Info about Victorian Section)
• IEEE Computer Society
• Golden Key International Honour Society

Other Stuff

An example of one of those things you do that never seems to die, is an assignment that I did for computing theory.