SIGMM Award 2010

The 2010 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Dr. Ramesh Jain. Dr Jain is currently the Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. The ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement award, given in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher’s career, cited Dr. Jain’s "pioneering research and inspiring leadership that transformed multimedia information processing to enhance the quality of life and visionary leadership of the multimedia community". The SIGMM award will be presented at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2010 that will be held October 25-29, 2010 in Florence, Italy.

Dr. Ramesh Jain has made pioneering contributions in the areas of multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems for more than three decades. His early work on accumulative difference pictures established the dynamic vision field that has directly influenced today’s digital video processing. Many techniques such as background subtraction, tracking, and event detection were first introduced in his pioneering papers in this field. In 1992, Ramesh proposed and organized the inaugural NSF workshop on visual information management systems that established a new research direction leading to the enormous advances that we see today in content-based analysis and search of images and video. Ramesh has pioneered techniques that analyze content and combine information from multiple sources. He has not only applied that to static multimedia data but his emphasis in recent years on event-based representation and analysis of multimedia data has led the community’s focus to be on live dynamic data. In fact, he has recently pioneered the first comprehensive multimedia Event model which is increasingly being adopted. Professor Ramesh Jain's research has also impacted society by his active entrepreneurship. He has founded five companies producing software and services in the area of image processing, visual media retrieval and multimedia experience management on the mobile platform. For example, Virage Inc., has been deeply influential in the development of image and video search engines.

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