I am looking forward to this year’s ACM Multimedia conference in Singapore. I am leaving tomorrow morning and will be back on Saturday.
It will be interesting to see how much progress has been made in emphasizing ‘multi’ in multimedia. Two year’s ago in the retreat at Berkeley it was decided to start putting emphasis on correlated media. It is interesting that in a multimedia conference most papers were on mono-medium. The increased emphasis has definitely resulted in getting some attention, but it is still not clear that we are even close to where we have to be. The importance and attractiveness of multimedia is in the correlated multimedia.
Research in computer vision and speech processing has convinced all researchers that they are working on a very hard problem. I believe that this conclusion is erroneous. The problems are not inherently hard, but have been made hard by the researchers. And this is done by ignoring the fact that the information in one medium in many cases is incomplete and can not lead to what is needed to solve a problem.
I am eager to see how much progress has been made. As the Chairman of ACM Multimedia, I am also struggling with this issue because the community should be convinced that they should be addressing the real problem, rather than the contrived version. The difficulty is that due to tradition in the field, it is easy to write papers that are on traditional mono problems rather than multi issues.
More on this during next few days from Singapore.