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

The 2013 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Prof. Dr. Dick Bulterman. He is currently a Research Group Head of the Distributed and Interactive Systems at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is also a Full Professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His research interests are multimedia authoring and document processing. His recent research concerns socially-aware multimedia, interactive television, and media analysis.

The ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher’s career. Prof. Dick Bulterman has been selected for his outstanding technical contributions in multimedia authoring, media annotation, and social sharing from research through standardization to entrepreneurship, and in particular for promoting international Web standards for multimedia authoring and presentation (SMIL) in the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group as well as his dedicated involvement in the SIGMM research community for many years. The SIGMM award will be presented at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2013 that will be held Oct 21–25 2013 in Barcelona, Spain.

Dick Bulterman has been a long time intellectual leader in the area of temporal modeling and support for complex multimedia system. His research has led to the development of several widely used multimedia authoring systems and players. He developed the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model, the CMIF document structure, the CMIFed authoring environment, the GRiNS editor and player, and a host of multimedia demonstrator applications. In 1999, he started the CWI spinoff company called Oratrix Development BV, and he worked as CEO to widely deliver this software.

Dick has a strong international reputation for the development of the domain-specific temporal language for multimedia (SMIL). Much of this software has been incorporated into the widely used Ambulant Open Source SMIL Player, which has served to encourage development and use of time-based multimedia content. His conference publications and book on SMIL have helped to promote SMIL and its acceptance as a W3C standard.

Dick’s recent work on social sharing of video will likely prove influential in upcoming Interactive TV products. This work has already been recognized in the academic community, earning the ACM SIGMM best paper award at ACM MM 2008 and also at the EUROITV conference.

In summary, Prof. Bulterman’s accomplishments include pioneering and extraordinary contributions in multimedia authoring, media annotation, and social sharing and outstanding service to the computing community.

---

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