SIGMM Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications

The SIGMM Ph.D. Award Committee is pleased to recommend this year's award for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis in multimedia computing, communications and applications to Dr. Wanmin Wu.

Wu's dissertation documents fundamental work in the area of unifying systems  and user-centric approaches to managing information flows for supporting 3D tele-immersive environments. She has developed a theoretical framework for modeling and measuring QoE,  and for correlating QoE with Quality-of-Service (QoS) in distributed multi-modal interactive environments. This work has been significant in that it introduced the importance of the user-centric approach to modelling and managing complex three-dimensional data exchanges in time-constrained systems.

The committee considered the main innovations of this work to be:

a) Identifying and incorporating human psycho-physical factors along with traditional QOS to improve experience;
b) Proposing new methods and theory for QOS in interactive multi-camera environments that have served as a catalyst for enabling work in distributed education, medicine and conferencing;
c) The development of new methods for video coding incorporating understanding of users psycho-physical understanding of color and depth. 

These new methods have significantly reduced the impact of sharing tele-immersive information and are likely to have a longer-term benefit that is similar to that of selective audio encoding.

The committee has considered this contribution as worthy of the award as it tackles a new problem, proposes new theory and practice as a solution to this problem area, and opens the way for further research into effective distributed three-dimensional immersive systems.