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Understanding Meta-Media, Lev Manovich, UCSD

In this article, Dr. Manovich discusses the idea of ‘meta-media’ – new media objects as a result of combining media and programmatic structures. He identifies this relationship in terms of the history of computing, as well as the contemporary ‘remix’ in terms of aesthetic production – remixing of cultural contexts, and submergence of national cultural traditions in the medium of globalization. Computer science researchers should note the parallels between the idea of meta-media and Niklaus Wirth’s notion – "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs."

Multimedia Needs Text Books, Ramesh Jain, Chair SIGMM

In this article, Dr. Jain argues for development of multimedia text books as a crucial step towards the development of Multimedia. He argues that such presence of books written for a more general audience create a broad and significant academic impact. He analyzes the role of text books, by giving a historical perspective – he traces the development of text books in computer vision in relationship to the development of the field, and highlights the impact of several books including Marr’s book on Vision.

Emerging Trends in Multimedia Systems: Mohan S Kankanhalli, NUS

In this article, Dr. Kankanhalli, discusses emerging trends in the multimedia community. He points out four areas of increasing attention to the multimedia community – (a) Increasing Diversity of Media, (b) Use of Context and History, (c) Human-in-the-loop Approach and (d) the Use of Feedback Control

Distributed, Multimodal Sensor-data Fusion and Analysis: Edward Chang, UCSB

In this article, Dr. Chang discusses the importance of sensor networks to multimedia research. He describes different challenges – in building sensors, configuring sensor networks, and developing models for managing and interpreting sensor signals. He then suggests that the multimedia community can play an important role in the following reserac areas: (a) Multimodal sensor-data management, (b) Multimodal sensor-data analysis and interpretation, (c) Sensor-data interaction, and (d) Real-world system development and deployment.

The Need for Usable Social Interfaces: Karrie Karahalios, UIUC

In this article, Dr. Karahalios discusses the need for new interfaces for social communication. To date, most of the research in this field deals with the technical aspects of improving transmission speed, clarity, and accuracy. The quest to uncover the underlying social needs for communication is often neglected. The latter is an issue far bigger and far more fascinating than creating network topologies for connecting as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. The technology exists; now, the social forces driving communication are far more powerful than the technical capabilities of these systems.

Metadata - a matter of process awareness - Frank Nack, CWI

Over the last 15 years a great deal of multimedia research has been directed towards the development of computer environments that seek to interpret, manipulate or generate audio-visual media either in a manual, semi-automatic, or automatic way...

Why Multimedia Still Matters - Ketan Mayer-Patel, UNC Chapel Hill

In order to forsee the future of multimedia, I think it is important to identify what motivated the formation of the subfield in the first place. In my opinion, the field has tackled problems in the intersection of more traditional subfields (i.e., operating systems, networking, graphics, coding theory, vision, etc.) because its driving applications demanded integrated solutions in order to achieve desired results. In other words, the application was somehow more than just the sum of its parts...

Multimedia Information Retrieval: Promises and Challenges - Nicu Sebe, University of Amsterdam

The explosion of multimedia content in databases, broadcasts, streaming media, etc. has generated new requirements for more effective access to these global information repositories. Content extraction, indexing, and retrieval of multimedia data continues to be one of the most challenging and fastest-growing research areas...

On Human-Centered Multimedia