On the morning of August 16, 2026, the 54th Electronics and Information Lecture was successfully held in Room North 514, Engineering Park Building 3, Shenzhen Campus. The lecture was organized by the Graduate Student Union of the School of Electronics and Communication Engineering. IEEE Fellow Professor Patrick Le Callet of Polytech Nantes was invited as the speaker, and Professor Yun Zhang served as the host. The lecture was titled "Quality Assessment in Context: The QoE Way Towards Sustainable Media Consumption." Professor Le Callet is a Full Professor at Polytech Nantes / Nantes Université and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He leads interdisciplinary research on human perception, media processing, and cognitive computing, with a focus on sustainable visual communication, quality of experience (QoE), and cognitive computing. A former scientific director of the Ouest Industries Créatives cluster, he has authored more than 500 publications and holds 16 patents. He is active on international editorial boards and in standardization bodies including VQEG and IEEE-SA, and was a co-recipient of the 2020 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for his contributions to perceptual metrics in video encoding.
Over the past 30 years, multimedia quality assessment has attracted growing research interest as images have become increasingly present in daily life. The concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) emerged in the early 2000s to reflect the degree of delight or annoyance experienced by users of an application or service. Because every experience occurs within a specific context - including viewing conditions, expectations, and costs - the effect of multimedia quality on QoE varies accordingly. The sustainability of multimedia consumption is also an important concern and gives QoE science an opportunity to deepen our understanding of how multimedia quality affects QoE in sustainable contexts. Professor Le Callet introduced testing methods for capturing observers' opinions of different media, computational prediction of perceived quality, applications in the media industry, and recent studies measuring how context influences perceived quality and QoE.
Professor Le Callet focused his presentation on multimedia quality assessment and QoE. He explained that the rapid integration of image and multimedia technologies into everyday life has driven sustained interest in quality assessment over the past three decades. As a key measure of user satisfaction with an application or service, QoE is highly dependent on contextual factors such as viewing conditions, user expectations, and cost. He further emphasized that the sustainability of multimedia consumption deserves close attention in the current global pursuit of sustainable development. This is not only an industry challenge, but also an opportunity for QoE science to better explain how multimedia quality shapes users' actual experiences in different contexts.
During the question-and-answer session, students discussed the generalizability of QoE models, practical approaches to sustainable media consumption, and other topics with Professor Le Callet. He answered their questions and encouraged young researchers to pursue interdisciplinary collaboration and extend QoE research into broader application scenarios. After the lecture, the students took a group photo with Professor Le Callet.
The lecture broadened the academic perspectives of faculty and students in multimedia quality assessment and brought new momentum to the School's exploration of sustainable media consumption and QoE research.