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

The 2023 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Professor Wenwu Zhu. The award is given in recognition of for his outstanding, pioneering and continued research contributions in the areas of Multimedia Communications and Analysis and for outstanding and continued service to the multimedia community.
 
Professor Wenwu Zhu is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, SPIE, a member of Academia Europaea,  a worldwide recognized leader in Multimedia Communications and Computing with significant and long-lasting impact on academia and industry. His contributions have significantly advanced the field via a prolific publication record including over 400 papers, 10 best paper awards, 6 books, and 100 patents (30,000+ Google citation and H-index of 90).

Dr. Zhu made pioneering contributions to video streaming over the Internet. Video applications typically have stringent latency and low packet-loss requirements, which could hardly be supported by the Internet two decades ago. He proposed end-to-end QoS control for MPEG4 over the Internet, which significantly changed the quality of MPG4 video streaming. His paper on video streaming over the Internet was the most cited paper in IEEE TCSVT 2001 and since then has been widely cited (1200+ citations by Google Scholar). His series of works on MPEG-4 video streaming with QoS control was well-recognized and received 2001 IEEE TCSVT Best Paper Award and 2004 IEEE Multimedia Communication Best Paper Award. In addition, his paper “Two Decades of Internet Video Streaming: A Retrospective View” was published in the special issue to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of ACM Multimedia. Dr. Zhu is the first to propose the principal concept for multimedia cloud computing and media edge cloud, which is widely cited and referred by academia and industry.

Dr. Zhu also made fundamental contributions to multimedia representation learning. His distinctive work “Structural Deep Network Embedding” proposed the first deep model of network representation learning for heterogenous information, which has become an important benchmark and widely used in practice (2800+ citations). His another widely cited paper (1200+ citations) “Asymmetric Transitivity Preserving Graph Embedding” successfully solved the asymmetric transitivity problem in directed graphs, which is a unsolved fundamental problem for capturing asymmetric relations in the graph. He wrote a book on automated representation learning for multimedia and continuously delivered 7 tutorials on representation learning in top conferences such as ACM Multimedia, AAAI, etc., making significant contributions in promoting the development of this research direction. To bridge the gap between multimedia content and users’ information needs, Dr. Zhu proposed the first propagation-based social-aware multimedia content replication framework in which jointly optimize content intelligence, user intelligence, and context intelligence. This work received the Best Paper Award in ACM Multimedia 2012. He further proposed “Social-sensed Multimedia Computing” which was invited by the Vision and View column of IEEE Multimedia and won the Best Department Paper Award in IEEE Multimedia 2018. A couple of works on this subject have received ACM Multimedia 2012 Grand Challenge Prize, International Multimedia Modelling 2013 Best Paper Award, and IEEE ICME 2014 Best Paper Award.

Professor Zhu is a widely recognized leader across-societies  in multimedia community and serves in various leadership positions. Most notably, he served as the steering committee chair for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) from 2020-2022, served as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia from 2017-2019, and Associate Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT) from 2020-2021. He will be the new Editor-in-Chief for IEEE TCSVT beginning from 2024. He has been serving as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM) for over 8 years.  He also served in the Steering Committee for ACM Multimedia, MM Asia, IEEE TMM and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. He serves as General Co-chair for ACM Multimedia 2018 and ACM CIKM 2019, and TPC Co-chair for ACM Multimedia 2014.

In summary, with pioneering contributions to research, significant impact on industry products, and exceptional services to the multimedia community, Professor Wenwu Zhu is an exemplary researcher, who is exceptionally qualified for receiving the prestigious SIGMM Technical Achievement Award.

Many Congratulations to Wenwu!

Phoebe Chen

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