Accepted Papers - Panel

The accepted panel for ACM Multimedia 2005 is:

What is the State of Our Community?

Moderator:
Yong Rui, Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA.

Panelist

• Ramesh Jain, SIGMM Chair, University of California, Irvine
• Nicolas D. Georganas, EiC, ACM TOMCCAP, University of Ottawa
• Hong-Jiang Zhang, EiC, IEEE TMM, Microsoft Research Asia ATC
• Klara Nahrstedt, EiC, MMSJ, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• John Smith, Program Chair, ACM MM'03, IBM T. J Watson
• Mohan Kankanhalli, Program Chair, ACM MM'05, National University of Singapore
   

Panel Topic

Compared with other research areas, multimedia is still a relative young community. While we made significant progress in the past decade on multimedia data capture, transmission, analysis and authoring, we still have a long way to meet our grant challenges [1]. For our healthy growth in the past decade, we owe thanks to the pioneers and leaders. We are all now responsible to elevate the community to the next level.

A question that we multimedia researchers want to ask ourselves is that why multimedia is not yet first-tier research area. In this panel, we bring together SIGMM Chair, EiCs of major multimedia journals, and past ACM multimedia program chairs together to explore potential solutions.

• Curricular

  Observation: While multimedia related courses are taught here and there in schools, it is not part of the core CS/EE curricular.

  Question: Can we have a healthy and strong multimedia community without having it in the core curricular? If no, where do we get the supply of new multimedia researchers? If yes, what makes multimedia a required course? What should be the main chapters of a multimedia textbook? What are the foundational sciences of multimedia?

• Industry support

  Observation: SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI are quite influential because their both have strong industries stand behind them.

  Question: What is our industry? Can it be distributed multimedia communication and collaboration? Can it be multimedia authoring? Who are the influential companies in those domains? What are our potential killer applications? Can this community a first tier without owning killer applications?

• Conferences

  Observation: We have one good conference, and then many third tier ones.

  Question: Can the community be healthy without having a strong 2nd tier conference? How can we work toward establishing at least one more good multimedia conference?

• Review process

  Observation: Though we have the retreat report, not all the conference PC members or journal reviewers follow the suggestion from the report. We do not have a uniform guide line. A paper can be rejected just because the reviewer has a different definition of multimedia.

  Questions: How should be select PC members? What is a good review process? Is combining two media together enough to be a multimedia paper? If we want to encourage a particular research direction, e.g., audio retrieval, or hepatic sensors, can single media be good enough to a multimedia paper? Should we emphasize if human (e.g., as an interacting component, as an end consumer, or human factor has to be taken into account) is an indispensable part of the algorithm/system?

• Success metric

  Question: How our success can be measures? What does it take for this community to have ten MAE-equivalent (MAE: Member of the Academy of Engineering) members in ten years?

References

[1] L. Rowe and R. Jain, ACM SIGMM retreat report, ACM TOMCCAP, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 3-13, Feb. 2005.