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.