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

The 2021 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Professor Jiebo Luo. The award is given in recognition of his outstanding, pioneering and continued research contributions in the areas of multimedia content analysis and social media analytics, and for outstanding and continued service to the multimedia community.

Professor Jiebo Luo is one of the most influential scholars in the general field of multimedia, and particularly in social media mining (ranked 2nd) according to Google Scholar. Professor Luo’s remarkable impact is evidenced by the breadth and depth of his scholarly productions (500+ publications, 4 books, 33,000+ citations, h-index 101, and 95 US issued patents) and 8 best paper awards. Professor Luo is a dedicated contributor to the multimedia, ACM and broad research communities. Most notably among his rich services, he served as Program Co-Chair of 2010 ACM Multimedia Conference, 2012 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), and 2017 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), as well as General Chair of 2008 ACM International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) and 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2020-2022), and served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI, 2006-2011), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM, 2004-2008 & 2013-2016), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT, 2010-2012), IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD, 2018-present), and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST, 2015-present), and several other journals. Due to his extraordinary accomplishments in research and service, Professor Luo was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2008, ACM Fellow in 2018, and AAAI Fellow in 2018.

One of the hallmarks of Professor Luo is his persistent pursuit of new research frontiers in multimedia and computer vision research, including investigating computational inference of sentiment and emotion in images and multimedia (e.g., his AAAI 2015 paper has 415 citations), and bridging images and video with language, e.g., video-language alignment, visual questioning and answering, visual grounding in images and videos, image and video captioning (e.g., his CVPR 2016 paper has 1320 citations), multimodal machine translation, vision-aided grammar induction (2021 NAACL Best Long Paper; NAACL is one of the top three NLP conferences), as well as more advanced styled captioning by incorporating extra factors such as sentiment, humor and romance, in order to move beyond classification to interpretation. It is worth noting that many of these ground-breaking papers were published in ACM Multimedia. In 2020, he proposed another brand-new task of image sentiment transfer, again in the Brave and New Ideas track of the ACM Multimedia conference.

Professor Luo was also an accomplished researcher in his 15-year industry career. He was a principal contributor to the Kodak Digital Radiography System, at the core of which is a suite of innovative image segmentation, classification, and rendering technologies detailed by a family of US patents. These algorithms were a critical differentiator and helped Kodak grow digital market share by an order of magnitude over 4 years and become the market leader in the world. This contribution was recognized by the 2004 Eastman Innovation Award, Kodak’s highest technology prize. Professor Luo is extremely influential as an educator and an academic leader. He has been extraordinarily successful in mentoring young researchers either as his research interns or PhD students, many of whom have become star researchers in their own right (including recipients of the SIGMM Rising Star Award). He has graduated a large number of PhD students (with 9 more currently under supervision), and more impressively, has mentored numerous master students and undergraduate students to produce research publications.

In summary, with pioneering contributions to research, significant impact on industry products and societal good, outstanding achievements in education, as well as exceptional service to the multimedia community, Professor Jiebo Luo is an exemplary researcher and educator, who is exceptionally qualified for receiving the prestigious SIGMM Technical Achievement Award.

Many Congratulations to Jiebo!

Phoebe Chen

SIGMM Vice-Chair
On Behalf of SIGMM Technical Achievement Award Committee