ACM SIGMM 2024 Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications

The 2024 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Professor Chang-Wen Chen. The award is in recognition of for his outstanding and pioneering contributions in mobile multimedia systems and applications, and continued service and leadership in the multimedia community.

Chang-Wen Chen is a world-leading researcher who has made groundbreaking contributions  in several technical areas in multimedia communication, multimedia systems, multimedia signal processing, and image/video processing. He has been known for taking bold research topics and leading new research trends. In particular, Chen is an undisputed forerunner in mobile multimedia systems. He has pioneered several thrusts of research in mobile multimedia systems, including joint source and channel coding for mobile video communication, energy-efficient mobile video display systems, and cloud mobile media systems. During his academic career, he has published six books, 400+ papers, and 10+ patents, and have received 10 best paper awards. In 2018, his PhD student, Dr. Zhisheng Yan received the prestigious ACM SIGMM Best PhD Dissertation Award.

His first groundbreaking technical contribution is a revolutionary computer vision approach he developed for cardiac dynamics estimation. Before his research, computer vision research was working on estimating the motion of rigid objects and deformable motion estimation was not even considered by the computer vision community. The solution proposed by Chen and his collaborators is a powerful deformable surface-based approach capable of capturing both global contraction of the left ventricle and local deformation of cardiac muscles [T-PAMI, 1994]. The global contraction with twist is captured by a super-quadric surface while the local periodic deformation is captured by spherical harmonics. 

The second pioneering technical contribution is in developing adaptive and robust mobile multimedia communication systems, in which several original theoretical foundations have been laid for joint source and channel coding in the delivery of compressed video under adversely mobile environments. For a long time, there was a lack of theoretical and systematic frameworks to guide the practice until Chen’s seminal publication [T-CSVT, 2002], where he presented a practically working joint source-channel coding scheme for wireless delivery of MPEG-4 video to mobile devices. This groundbreaking research was regarded by his peers as the most comprehensive and thorough theoretical framework in wireless video communication. This JSCC system and its derivatives have also been adopted by worldwide mobile communication service providers for mobile video streaming, a common practice of contemporary smart phone users.

The third distinctive contribution is his research in compressive sensing-based multimodal sensor data network design for monitoring cloud data centers. The successful scheme offers fresh frame of mind for research in both compressive sampling applications and large-scale wireless sensor networks. The proposed compressive data gathering is able to reduce global-scale communication costs without introducing intensive computation or complicated transmission control. More importantly, the proposed scheme has been tested in Microsoft’s real cloud center data and demonstrated superior performance.

Chen is also an enthusiastic and accomplished volunteer for the global multimedia community. He has dedicated significant energy for professional service to ACM and IEEE. For ACM, his numerous distinguished services include General Chair for ACM Multimedia 2020, Program Chair for ACM Multimedia 2018, and Panel Chair for both ACM Multimedia 2014 and ACM Multimedia 2015. 

In summary, with his outstanding and impactful contributions to research, education, and service to the Multimedia community, and his exemplary, continued and strong leadership, Professor Chang-Wen Chen is exceptionally qualified for receiving the prestigious SIGMM Technical Achievement Award.

Many Congratulations to Professor Chang-Wen Chen!

Phoebe Chen

SIGMM Vice-Chair
On Behalf of ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award Committee
November 10, 2024