SIGMM Records

Introducing the new Board of ACM SIG Multimedia

In spring 2009, the members of SIGMM were asked to elect the new board of ACM SIG Multimedia. Many SIG members took this opportunity and voted for their favorite candidate. The result of the election was announced at the end of June 2009. We are presenting the plans that the new board has already formed in its first week after the election. For those readers of the Records who might know all of the board members yet, we are also including a brief bio for each of them, and hope that you will follow the board's encouragement to contribute to the development of the SIG.

Statement by the new board

We are living in exciting times when digital video and audio are becoming available via different platforms, in multiple size and shapes. Multimedia has always been a field at the forefront of changes in visual, audio, and audio-visual computing, and thus has constantly redefined itself. However, it is not yet ubiquitous and pervasive. Hence, we as the SIGMM elected officers plan to energize the multimedia community to make the multimedia technologies pervasive across different user groups, applications, devices, systems, and networks, keep the multimedia community open-minded, and the home to many novel ideas utilizing all kinds of media. This will mean to address the burning problems coming from the fast merger of multimedia system, networking, content acquisition, display and user interface technologies with humanities, medicine, and other application areas. We need to be in the front of this development, and we will aim to make this happen through several steps.

First, we will support effective multimedia information gathering, dissemination, preservation, and sharing via SIGMM conference, workshop, journal, web and electronic activities to strengthen the multimedia community. Especially, we will aim to ensure that SIGMM venues are associated with quality in terms of content and organization, reflect the diversity and interest of the community which is constantly evolving, and encourage the development of a vibrant international community of multimedia researchers.

Second, we will encourage special projects, professional meetings and other activities that (a) bring together communities to identify new interdisciplinary problems, (b) strengthen ties between academia and industry so that our academic community has a strong impact on industry and vice versa., and (c) assist in educational efforts so that our community can ensure to be in the front during these exciting times of new challenges and discoveries.

Klara Nahrstedt (SIGMM Chair)
Rainer Lienhart (SIGMM Vice-Chair)
Mohan Kankanhalli (SIGMM Conference Chair)

Prof. Dr. Klara Nahrstedt (SIGMM Chair)

Dr. Klara Nahrstedt received her B.S. (1984) and MS (1985) in Mathematics, Humboldt University, Berlin. She received PhD (1995) in Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania. She was Assistant Professor (1995-2001), Associate Professor (2001-2005) and she is Full Professor since 2005.

Dr. Nahrstedt served as General Co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2006, General Chair of ACM NOSSDAV 2007. Since 2007, she serves as ACM SIG Multimedia chair. She has served as EiC of ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (2000-2007), and currently she is Associate Editor in ACM TOMCCAP (2006-present).

Dr. Nahrstedt received Weierstrass Prize for her MS thesis 1985, Early NSF Career Award (1995), Junior Xerox Award (1998), Best Tutorial Paper Award from IEEE Communications Society 1999; Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper award from IEEE Communication Society, 2000. In 2002, Dr. Nahrstedt was named Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor, and in 2009 she received the Humboldt Research Prize. Dr. Nahrstedt co-authored two widely-used multimedia textbooks, "Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications", published by Prentice Hall, 1995, and "Multimedia Systems", published by Springer Verlag, 2004.

She is Fellow of the IEEE (2008-present) and member of ACM (1996-present). Her research interests are in multimedia distributed systems, Quality of Service (QoS) and resource management in wired and wireless networks, real-time security and tele-immersive systems.

Prof. Dr. Mohan Kankanhalli (SIGMM Vice Chair)

Dr. Mohan Kankanhalli obtained his BTech (Electrical Engineering) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and his MS/PhD (Computer and Systems Engineering) from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He is a Professor at the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Multimedia Systems Journal and Multimedia Tools and Applications. His current research interests are in Multimedia Systems (content processing, retrieval) and Multimedia Security (surveillance, authentication and digital rights management).

Prof. Dr. Rainer Lienhart (Director of Conferences)

Rainer Lienhart is a full professor in the computer science department of the University of Augsburg where he heads the Multimedia Computing Lab (MMC Lab). His group is focusing on all aspects of very large-scale image, video, and audio mining algorithms including feature extraction and image/video retrieval.

Currently, from April till October 2009, he is spending his sabbatical at Willow Garage - a robotic company, which is working on laying the groundwork for the industry that will be needed to enable personal robotics applications by investing in open source such as OpenCV and open platform adoption models. Rainer Lienhart has always been an active contributor to OpenCV. From August 1998 to July 2004 he was a Staff Researcher at Intel's Microprocessor Research Lab in Santa Clara, California, where he worked on transforming a network of heterogeneous, distributed computing platforms into an array of audio/video sensors and actuators capable of performing complex DSP tasks such as distributed beamforming, audio rendering, audio/visual tracking, and camera array processing. In particular, this requires putting distributed heterogeneous computing platforms with audio -visual sensors into a common time and space coordinate system. At the same time, he was also continuing his work on media mining, where he is well known for his work in video content analysis with contributions in text detection/recognition, commercial detection, face detection (see also here), shot and scene detection, and automatic video abstraction. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Mannheim, Germany, in 1998, where he was a member of the Movie Content Analysis Project (MoCA).

The scientific work of Rainer Lienhart covers more than 80 refereed publications and more than 20+ patents. He was a general co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2007 and SPIE Storage and Retrieval of Media Databases 2004 & 2005. He serves in the editorial boards of 3 international journals. For more than a decade he is a committee member of ACM Multimedia, IEEE ICME, SPIE Storage and Retrieval of Media Databases, and many more conferences.