This work contribution in this area relates multimedia and telephony. Specifically we introduce a simple way of capturing and processing data in a multimedia real-time environment of parallel processes, where the data must be processed quickly before it becomes obsolete. We presented a mechanism that achieves this performance requirement by avoiding the overhead of locking or buffering while permitting concurrent access to shared data. Its novelty is based on the fact that in a multimedia environment, data loss isn't catastrophic, but it must be recognized when data loss occurs. Thus, this approach effectively relaxes concurrency control by permitting the processing component to recognize whether captured data is obsolete prior to processing. If the data is obsolete, it is discarded. This is useful and acceptable in a multimedia environment where data to be processed has to be complete and not corrupted. The algorithm presented in this work has been published in the following paper and has already been implemented and shipped in IBM's Mwave Telephone Answering Machine (TAM) offering. Extension of this work to incorporate sound and video is under way.

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