I am seeing lot of excitement among students and even among some industrial people about the Multimedia Grand Challenge launched by ACM Multimedia Conference Committee. I am happy to see good leadership demonstrated by Naaman and Chua in this area. Good excitement created.
One thing that is a bit confusing to people, however, is that there are many companies listed with their own GC (Grand Challenges) and this does confuse people. They are thinking about GC as those associated with specific companies. This may also lead people to think that those specific companies may offer specific incentives to people working on their challenge. IN my opinion, it would be nicer to identify challenges as those presented by the ACM MM rather than specific companies. This may also make it possible for organizers to combine two (sub)challenges to make a Grand Challenge.
These are suggestions for the next year. I think for the first year, I am already impressed by the initial excitement created by this. Hopefully, the results will be in line with the initial response. I will definitely mentor more than one group to respond to these. In other words, I will be an active participant in the program.
What problems do Google, Yahoo, HP, Radvision, CeWe, Nokia and other companies see in the future of multimedia? The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from these (and other) industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 2-5 year horizon for multimedia. The Grand Challenge is initially presented as part of ACM Multimedia 2009. Researchers will be encouraged to submit working systems in response to the challenge to win the Grand Challenge competition!
Can you solve these problems?
This is a great suggestions, Ramesh! We actually may have one or two new challenges, and the overlap would even grow further if that happens. Certainly makes sense to “merge”, but sadly may only happen next year 🙂
In any case, details will be posted on the GC blog.
according to there rules a submission should consist of a two-page summary to the ACM MM Grand Challenge track and the authors may include a link to an online demo or video. And at the conference, you will introduce the idea shortly to the audience, give a quick demo, and take short questions from the judges. Based on your presentation, a team of judges and the attending crowd will select the top contributors. Now its your presentation or your idea :s
Learning theory in the past decade has expanded dramatically because of the introduction of multimedia. Several lines of research have evolved (e.g. Cognitive load, Multimedia learning, and the list goes on.