Yao Wang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1990. Since 1990, she has been with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY. Her research areas include video communications, multimedia signal processing, and medical imaging. She has authored and co-authored over 100 papers in journals and conference proceedings. She is a senior member of IEEE and has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. She won the Mayor's Award of the City of New York for Excellence in Science and Technology in the Young Investigator category in 2000.Jvrn Ostermann studied electrical engineering and communications engineering at the University of Hannover and Imperial College London, respectively. He received Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. from the University of Hannover in 1988 and 1994, respectively. He has been a staff member with Image Processing and Technology Research, AT&T Labs>Research since 1996, where he is engaged in research on video coding, shape coding, multi-modal human-computer interfaces with talking avatars, standardization, and image analysis. He is a German National Foundation scholar. In 1998, he received the AT&T Standards Recognition Award and the ISO award. He is a member of the IEEE, the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing, and chair of the IEEE CAS Visual Signal Processing and Communications (VSPC) Technical Committee.Ya-Qin Zhang received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 1983 and 1985, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from George Washington University in 1989. He is currently the Managing Director of Microsoft Research in Beijing, after leaving his post as the Director of Multimedia Technology Laboratory at the Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, NJ (formerly the David Sarnoff Research Center, and RCA Laboratories). He has been engaged in research and commercialization of MPEG2/DTV, MPEG4/VLBR, and multimedia information technologies. He has authored and co-authored over 200-refereed papers in leading international conference proceedings and journals. He has been granted over 40 U.S. patents in digital video, Internet, multimedia, wireless and satellite communications. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology from 1997 to 1999. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.