SIGMM 2015 Year End Update

Dear Multimedia Colleagues,

I'd like to take this chance to wish everyone a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year in 2016!

2015 has been a fantastic year for SIGMM and the overall multimedia community. Following the action plans set in the 2014 SIGMM Retreat, we move on to implement the T-shaped vision for multimedia emphasizing both the depth and breadth of research underlying a wide range of applications. We are pleased to see our core technical conferences, ACM Multimedia, MMSys, and ICMR continue to be among the most impactful conferences in the field of multimedia.

The inaugural SIGMM Workshop on Multimedia Frontier held in conjunction with ACMMM 15 in Brisbane was a great success. Twelve rising star speakers were invited to share their vision and groundbreaking discoveries. They were paired with twelve senior leaders to discuss open issues and future direction over a wide spectrum of topics. The responses were extremely positive and we plan to continue this initiative in the future.

Our local chapters have done an amazing job in organizing events that have attracted many speakers and large audiences from industry and academia. The SIGMM Bay Area chapter, chaired by Dr. Qiong Liu, has organized eight wonderful workshops since 2013 covering some of the hottest topics presented by influential researchers and industry leaders. I’d encourage everyone to visit the very impressive talk archive at the BAMMF forum.

We are thrilled to welcome Prof. Alberto del Bimbo to the position of Editor in Chief of ACM TOMM, following the term led by Prof. Ralf Steinmetz, to whom we are immensely grateful for his extraordinary leadership and contributions. This year we are also privileged to celebrate the achievements of several multimedia leaders, who have received the IEEE Fellow recognition. We are proud to share bios listed below.

Let me close by inviting everyone to actively take part in SIGMM activities. The success of the community depends on the generous contributions from volunteers. I look forward to hearing new ideas and actions from everyone!

Shih-Fu Chang

ACM SIGMM Chair 

*********** SIGMM members awarded IEEE Fellows in 2015 ************

Kiyoharu Aizawa

Prof. Kiyoharu Aizawa, received the B.E., the M.E., and the Dr.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering all from the University of Tokyo, in 1983, 1985, 1988, respectively. He is currently a Professor and a Department Chair at the Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering of the University of Tokyo. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Illinois from 1990 to 1992. His research interest has been in image processing and multimedia applications. He has contributed pioneering work in the fields of (1) model-based coding, and (2) multimedia lifelog. He has recently been extending the latter to multimedia food logging for dietary assessment, the outcome of which is made available to public as FoodLog platform. He serves/served editorial boards of ACM TOMM, IEEE TIP, IEEE TMM, IEEE CSVT etc. He served organization committee members of a number of international conferences including ACM Multimedia 2012 General co-Chair. He was awarded IEEE Fellow for contribution to model-based coding and multimedia lifelogging.

Alan Hanjalic

Dr. Alan Hanjalic is a professor of computer science and head of the Multimedia Computing Group at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research interests and expertise are in the fields of multimedia information retrieval, including multimedia content analysis, multimedia search and recommender systems. In 2012, he was awarded the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Chair, which is “reserved for the best young scientists at the Delft University of Technology” (quote: TU Delft). He was co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) 2012, the Winner Award of the ACM RecSys 2010 CAMRa Challenge and the Winner Award of the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2015. Prof. Hanjalic is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE MultiMedia Magazine and Chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He has also been active as member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Signal Processing (2011-2013) and the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (since 2015). Prof. Hanjalic has served as a member of Editorial Boards of several scientific journals, among which the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2006-2014), the IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing (since 2010) and the Springer International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval (since 2011). In addition, Prof. Hanjalic has also served on the organizing committees of major conferences in the multimedia field, including the ACM Multimedia (General Chair 2009 and 2016, Program Chair 2007 and 2014), IEEE ICME (Program Chair 2012), ACM ICMR (Program Chair 2011) and ACM CIVR (Program Chair 2008). Prof. Hanjalic was a Keynote Speaker at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing 2013, International Conference on Multimedia Modeling 2012, and at the Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia 2007.

Xian-Sheng Hua

Dr. Xian-Sheng Hua became a Researcher and Senior Director of Alibaba Group in April of 2015, leading the multimedia technology team in the Search Division. Before that, he was a senior researcher of Microsoft Research Redmond since 2013, worked on Web-scale image and video understanding and search, as well as related applications. He was a Principal Research and Development Lead in Multimedia Search for the Microsoft search engine, Bing, since 2011, where he led a team that designed and delivered leading-edge media understanding, indexing and searching features. He joined Microsoft Research Asia in 2001 as a researcher. Since then, his research interests have been in the areas of multimedia search, advertising, understanding, and mining, as well as pattern recognition and machine learning. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 research papers in these areas and has filed more than 90 patents. Dr Hua received his BS in 1996 and PhD in applied mathematics in 2001 from Peking University, Beijing. He served or is now serving as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. He served as a program co-chair for IEEE ICME 2013, ACM Multimedia 2012, and IEEE ICME 2012, as well as on the Technical Directions Board of IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was honored as one of the recipients of the prestigious 2008 MIT Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award for his outstanding contributions to video search. He won the Best Paper and Best Demonstration Awards at ACM Multimedia 2007, the Best Poster Award at IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing 2008, the Best Student Paper Award at ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2009, the Best Paper Award at International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling 2010, the best demonstration award at ICME 2014 and best paper award of IEEE Trans. On CSVT in 2014. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and will be an IEEE Fellow from January of 2016.

Qi Tian

Dr. Qi Tian is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). During 2008-2009, he took one-year Faculty Leave at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) as Lead Researcher in the Media Computing Group. Dr. Tian received his Ph.D. in ECE from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2002. Dr. Tian’s research interests include multimedia information retrieval and computer vision and published over 310 refereed journal and conference papers. He received Best Paper Awards from ACM ICMR 2015, PCM 2013, MMM 2013, ACM ICIMCS 2012 and a Top 10% Paper Award from MMSP 2011 and a Student Contest Paper in ICASSP 2006. He received 2014 Research Achievement Award from College of Science, UTSA. He received 2010 ACM Service Award. He is the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), Multimedia System Journal (MMSJ), and in the Editorial Board of Journal of Multimedia (JMM) and Journal of Machine Vision and Applications (MVA).