Content is Dead; Long Live Content!
Organizers
Lexing Xie (Australian National Univ., AU)
David A. Shamma (Yahoo! Research, US)
Cees G. M. Snoek (Univ. of Amsterdam, NL)
Panelists
Susanne Boll (Univ. of Oldenburg, DE)
Tat-Seng Chua (National Univ. of Singapore, SG)
Minoru “Mick” Etoh (NTT Docomo, JP)
Malcolm Slaney (Microsoft, US)
Yong Rui (Microsoft, CN/US)
Abstract
Ten years ago, at ACM MM 2002, a panel debated on “Media Semantics: Who Needs It and Why?” Today, the answer is obvious. While multimedia content analysis has always held a major research role, burgeoned on a foundation of machine learning and data-intensive algorithms, the past decade has brought new paradigms in media semantics like tagging, social networks, location-based services and mobility, or SoLoMo as it is often abbreviated. What do emerging approaches and paradigms-search and annotation in social information networks, crowd-sourced content tagging-mean for the future of content analysis in general? Is multimedia content analysis in its traditional legacy still a valid area of inquiry? Does the use and analysis of media need to be cast in new lights in order to maintain relevant for emerging modes of media sharing? This panel hosts senior experts from academia and the major industry Internet principals to debate whether content can continue to play a role in multimedia research and address utility and direction of content analysis, in the age of social, local and mobile media.
Lexing Xie is Senior Lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. She received B.S. from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, all in Electrical Engineering. She was with IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York from 2005 to 2010. Her research interests are in multimedia, data mining, and applied machine learning. Her recent projects include multimedia analysis, social media tracking, visual semantics, large-scale image and video search, geo-spatial and urban event modeling. Lexing’s research has received five best student paper and best paper awards in ACM MM 2002 and 2005, IEEE ICIP 2004, ACM/IEEE JCDL 2007 and IEEE SOLI 2011. She was the 2005 IBM Research Josef Raviv Memorial Postdoc fellow in Computer Science and Engineering. She was adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University 2007-2009, she regularly serves on the program and organizing committees of major multimedia conferences. http://cecs.anu.edu.au/~xlx
David A. Shamma is research scientist at Yahoo! Labs where he runs the Human-Computer Interaction Research group. He researches synchronous environments and connected experiences both online and in-the-world. Focusing on creative expression and sharing frameworks, he designs and prototypes systems for multimedia-mediated communication, as well as, develops targeted methods and metrics for understanding how people communicate online in small environments and at web scale. Dr. Shamma is also the co-editor for Arts and Digital Culture for the ACM’s SIG Multimedia.
Cees G.M. Snoek is currently an assistant professor at the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Amsterdam. He was a Visiting Scientist at Informedia, Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2003 and a Fulbright Junior Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Computer Vision Group in 2010-2011. His research interests focus on video and image retrieval. Dr. Snoek is the lead researcher of the award-winning MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine, which is a consistent top performer in the yearly NIST TRECVID evaluations. He is co-initiator and co-organizer of the annual VideOlympics, co-chair of: the SPIE Multimedia Content Access conference 2010-2013, and Area Chair of ACM Multimedia 2011 and 2012. Dr. Snoek is member of the editorial boards for IEEE MultiMedia and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. Cees is recipient of an NWO Veni award (2008), a Fulbright Junior Scholarship (2010), an NWO Vidi award (2012), and the Dutch Prize for ICT Research (2012). All for research excellence. Several of his Ph.D. students have won best paper awards, including the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award.
Susanne Boll is a Professor for Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Also, since 2002 she has been a member of executive board of the company OFFIS-Institute for Information Technology, Germany where she is the scientific head of many international and national research projects in the field of multimedia information retrieval and intelligent user interfaces. She is also the scientific head for the Human-Machine-Interaction technology cluster at the OFFIS-Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany.
Her research interests lie in the field of semantic retrieval of digital media, context-aware and location-based mobile systems, and intelligent user interfaces. She is a member of the editorial board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Multimedia Magazine and Associate Editor of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP) and Springer Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP). As an active member of the community, she served on program committees for many top international conferences and also co-organized several international events, for example, ACM Multimedia Conference. She is an active member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) of the ACM and German Computer Society (GI), and also a member of IEEE Computer Society.
Tat-Seng Chua is the KITHC Chair Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He was the Acting and Founding Dean of the School of Computing during 1998-2000. He joined NUS in 1983, and spent three years as a research staff member at the Institute of Systems Science (now I2R) in the late 1980s. Dr Chua’s main research interest is in multimedia information retrieval, and the crawling, analysis, organization and retrieval of live user generated contents (UGCs). He is the co-Director of a multi-million research Centre with Tsinghua University of China on “Extreme Search of UGCs”.
Dr. Chua has organized and served as program committee member of numerous international conferences in the areas of computer graphics, multimedia and text processing. He is the conference co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2005, CIVR 2005 (Conference on Image and Video Retrieval, now ICMR), and ACM SIGIR 2008. He serves in the editorial boards of: ACM Transactions of Information Systems (ACM), Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval (NOW), The Visual Computer (Springer Verlag), and Multimedia Tools and Applications (Kluwer). He is the member of steering committee of ICMR and Multimedia Modeling conference series; member of the International Review Panel of a large-scale research project in Europe; and Director of two publicly listed companies.
Minoru “Mick” Etoh is a Vice President of NTT DOCOMO, as well as the Managing Director of the Service & Solution Development Department. He is also President and CEO of DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. (Palo Alto, California). His fields of expertise include mobile network architecture & protocols, computer vision, distributed software, multimedia signal processing, audio / video / speech coding technologies, media delivery over mobile networks, and MPEG / ITU-T / 3GPP / W3C/ IETF standardization activities. He has written several books and more than a hundred journal papers on network architecture, terminal software, coding technologies, media transport, information retrieval, and data mining. Through the MPEG activities, he is recognized as one of major contributors to H.264 standard for Engineering Emmy Award 2008.
Malcolm Slaney is a principal scientist in the Conversational Systems Laboratory at Microsoft in Mountain View, CA. He is interested in building computational models of users, sounds, images, and video in order to better connect users and signals. For the last 20 years he has organized the Stanford CCRMA Hearing Seminar, where he is a (Consulting) Professor. Before joining Microsoft he was a researcher at Yahoo and IBM’s Almaden Research Center, working on multimedia analysis and user models. He has also been employed by Interval Research, Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Schlumberger’s Palo Alto Research Laboratory, and Bell Labs. He is the coauthor of the book “Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging,” which was recently republished by SIAM as a “Classics in Applied Mathematics.” He is coeditor of the book “Computational Models of Auditory Function.” He has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, IEEE Multimedia Magazine, and the Proceedings of the IEEE. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Yong Rui serves as Senior Director, Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D (ARD) Group, in charge of China Innovation. In this capacity, he and his team passionately drive local innovation and diligently make global impact in online, Windows, healthcare, digital entertainment and mobile spaces.
An IEEE Fellow, an SPIE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist, Dr. Rui is recognized as a pioneer and a world-class expert in Web multimedia search. He holds 40+ US and international patents. He has published 16 books and book chapters, and 100+ referred journal and conference papers. His publications are among the most cited — his top 10 papers have been cited 5,000 times.
From 2008 to 2010, Dr. Rui was Director of Microsoft Education R&D Group in China. The team developed Linked Note Taking one of the top features for Office OneNote 2010 and Interactive Classroom a key enabler for effective learning. From 2006 to 2008, he was Director of Strategy, working with ARD Chairman to envision and establish the 5 key R&D pillars in mobile, web, servers and tools, digital entertainment and emerging market. He joined Microsoft in 1999, after 8 years of graduate school. Before he came to China in 2006, he was leading the Multimedia Collaboration group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA. He and his team contributed several key technologies to Microsoft MovieMaker, Live Meeting, Office Communicator, and Media Server. He is one of the founding members of Microsoft Office RoundTable, an innovative distribute meeting system released in 2007.
Dr. Rui also serves for academia, industry, government and international standards. He is a Guest Professor of Peking University, Zhejiang University and Southeast University. He served on the editorial boards for all the first-class multimedia journals/transactions including ACM TOMCCAP and IEEE TMM. He also served on the review panels for both the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Chinese National Science Foundation (CNSF). He is a member of review committee of China’s National 1000-People Talent Program, the highest oversea talent attraction program. Dr. Rui received his BS from Southeast University, his MS from Tsinghua University, and his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He also holds a Microsoft Leadership Training Certificate from Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania.
