On the last day of the ACM Multimedia conference, there were many workshops. In fact, there were many that I wanted to at least sample to see what is going on in that area — like in video surveillance, multimedia information retrieval, and human centered multimedia. I ended up attending part of the Human Centered multimedia and then I had to leave to get back to Irvine. In fact I gave the key note in Human Centered Multimedia workshop. My presentation is available here.
The message that I wanted to convey was that computing has always been human centric but due to changed nature of data, computing, and communication now we have a chance to rethink how to utilize event based representations, experiences, and mobile phones as drives to bring more synergy between humans and machines to build environments that will be effortless foe humans to use. I enjoyed the talk because it appeared that audience was very receptive to the ideas. I plan to refine and modify the message for my key note talk in Hangzhou, China.
Human-centered computing/multimedia is in close relation with other interdisciplinary fields such as human-computer interaction and information science, and where exactly these two have meet is not clear. Broadly speaking, however, human-centered multimedia usually concerns itself with systems and practices of technology use.
On one hand, the fact that computers are becoming integrated into everyday objects at a brisk pace which in turn implies that effective natural human-computer interaction is becoming critical. However, the wide range of applications that use multimedia, and the amount of multimedia content currently available, clearly states that structuring successful computer vision and multimedia applications requires a deep understanding of multimedia content.
Human-centered computing embeds the human factors such as social and cultural awareness, human abilities, and adaptability to others’ activities in the information system and methodology design. This paper proposes a human-centered multimedia
This multidisciplinary workshop will focus on the multimedia aspects of HCC and introduce key concepts, discuss theoretical frameworks and technical approaches, challenges, research opportunities, and open issues in multimedia interaction, content analysis, and content production. We invite researchers and designers from various disciplines to submit original technical contributions to explore and define radical ways in which Human-Centered Multimedia can revolutionize computing. In order to break away from the traditional workshop format, a strong emphasis will be placed on discussions leading to specific goals set by the workshop organizers.