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

The 2012 winner of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Dr. HongJiang Zhang. He is currently Chief Executive Officer at Kingsoft. He also holds guest professorships at Tsinghua University and Harbin Institute of Technology. The ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement award, given in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher’s career, cites Dr. Zhang’s "pioneering contributions to and leadership in media computing including content-based media analysis and retrieval, and their applications.” The SIGMM award will be presented at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2012 that will be held Oct 29 – Nov 2 2012 in Nara, Japan.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Zhang began his pioneering work on content analysis and content-based abstraction, browsing, and retrieval of video, when these research areas were about to emerge. He established the foundations of this new research area by his numerous seminal contributions. Dr. Zhang’s most noteworthy early works include the first algorithm for reliably detecting gradual video scene transitions and content-based video key-frame extraction, one of the first works on compressed domain video content analysis, as well as his structured video analysis framework and algorithms. These pioneering works have had tremendous impact on the directions, methodologies and advancements of the media computing field.

Dr. Zhang’s research contributions also made a profound impact on the establishment of the ISO (International Standards Organization) MPEG-7 standard, which is the international standard that defines multimedia content descriptions.

In addition to his scholarly contributions, Dr. Zhang has significantly shaped the video indexing and editing software industry through his seminars, publications, patents and technology licensing and transfers to a number of companies and successful HP and Microsoft products. Most significant are:

1)     Image Bank’s video cataloging tools licensed to Image Bank. Inc.(1995);

2)     Video structure parsing technologies licensed to Intel in (1996);

3)     Media metadata definition and extraction algorithms in Window Imaging Platform;

4)     Image search in Microsoft Digital Image Pro (2003) and web search releases; and

5)     Automated video editing, a technology breakthrough that gained Microsoft MovieMaker 2.0 a five star rating by About.Com Desktop Video (2003).

In summary, Dr. Zhang’s accomplishments include pioneering and extraordinary contributions to media computing and outstanding service to the computing community.

ACM is the professional society of computer scientists, and SIGMM is the special interest group on multimedia.