ACM Multimedia 2007: Day 2

One of the Keynote talk today was by Reiner Fageth Of CeWe. This company in Germany has become a leader in the field of digital photo production. They identified that people take photos without worrying about the storage costs — they don’t want to miss any important thing. I agree that ‘Kodak moments’ are no longer that rare. Now the concept is not to find rare moments and capture them, but to capture as many moments as you can and then find the important ones from them. This company has developed automated technology to help people select right images and package them in attractive collections, called photobooks, and print them. They make money by supplying these photobooks. They work with mobile phones and all kind of cameras. They have kiosks at different locations. It is interesting to see how they have grown in the last few years as the photography transformed from chemical to digital. It is clear that there are many opportunities and challenges in this fast growing field. The second key note talk was on the workplace of the future by Knut Manske of SAP. He emphasized importance of emerging trends in networking and collaboration at the workplace. He showed how the emerging workplace will utilize all these interesting emerging technologies. T

he first Art session had a paper by Liza Marchenko (I am co-supervisor with TatSeng Chua) on annotation of painting followed by discussions on art creation process and what kind of social networks may emerge around paintings.  Clearly Flickr like netwroks are great for photos, but will it be same for paintings.  This is an interesting question.  Liza intends to explore this.

It was interesting to listen to other talks and see posters.  Clealry progress is happening, but nothing disruptive — according to me.