Category Archives: Feature

Annually, the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM) honors one member of the Editorial Board with the TOMM Associate Editor of the Year Award. The purpose of the award is the distinction of excellent work for ACM TOMM and hence also for the whole multimedia community in the previous year. Criteria for the award are (1.) the amount of submissions processed in time, (2.) the performance during the reviewing process and (3.) the accurate interaction with the reviewers in order to broader the awareness for the journal. Based on the criteria mentioned above, the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Associate Editor of the Year Award 2015 goes to Pradeep Atrey from State University of New York, Albany, USA. Pradeep K. Atrey is an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA. He is also an (on-leave) Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg, Canada and an Adjunct Professor at University of Ottawa, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore, M.S. in Software Systems and B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from India. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa, Canada. His current research interests are in the area of Security and Privacy with a focus on multimedia surveillance and privacy, multimedia security, secure-domain cloud-based large-scale multimedia analytics, and social media. He has authored/co-authored over 100 research articles at reputed ACM, IEEE, and Springer journals and conferences. His research has been funded by Canadian Govt. agencies NSERC and DFAIT, and by Govt. of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Atrey is on the editorial board of several journals including ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, ETRI Journal and IEEE Communications Society Review Letters. He was also guest editor for Springer Multimedia Systems and Multimedia Tools and Applications journals. He has been associated with over 40 international conferences/workshops in various roles such as Organizing Chair, Program Chair, Publicity Chair, Web Chair, Area Chair, Demo Chair and TPC Member. Dr. Atrey was a recipient of the Erica and Arnold Rogers Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship (2014), ETRI Journal Best Editor Award (2012), ETRI Journal Best Reviewer Award (2009) and the three University of Winnipeg Merit Awards for Exceptional Performance (2010, 2012 and 2013). He was also recognized as “ICME 2011 – Quality Reviewer” and is invited as a Rising Star Speaker at the SIGMM Inaugural Multimedia Frontier Workshop (2015). The Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Steinmetz cordially congratulates Pradeep.

The 2015 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award is provided to the paper “A Quality of Experience Model for Haptic Virtual Environments” (TOMM vol.10, Issue 3) by Abdelwahab Hamam, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik and Jihad Alja’am.

The purpose of the named award is to recognize the most significant work in ACM TOMM (formerly TOMCCAP) in a given calendar year. The whole readership of ACM TOMM was invited to nominate articles which were published in Volume 10 (2014). Based on the nominations the winner has been chosen by the TOMM Editorial Board. The main assessment criteria have been quality, novelty, timeliness, clarity of presentation, in addition to relevance to multimedia computing, communications, and applications.

The winning paper is grounded on the observation that so far there is only limited research on Quality of Experience (QoE) for Haptic-based Virtual Reality applications. In order to overcome this issue, the authors propose a human-centric taxonomy for the evaluation of QoE for haptic virtual environments. The QoE evaluation is applied through a fuzzy logic inference model. The taxonomy also gives guidelines for the evaluation of other multi-modal multimedia systems. This multi-modality was one of the main reasons for the selection of this article and TOMM members expect that it will have an impact on future QoE studies in various sub-fields of multimedia research.

The award honors the founding Editor-in-Chief of TOMM, Nicolas D. Georganas, for his outstanding contributions to the field of multimedia computing and his significant contributions to ACM. He exceedingly influenced the research and the whole multimedia community.

The Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Steinmetz and the Editorial Board of ACM TOMM cordially congratulate the winner. The award will be presented to the authors at the ACM Multimedia 2015 in Brisbane, Australia, and includes travel expenses for the winning authors.

Abdelwahab Hamam received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2013. He is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at Immersion in Montreal, Canada focusing in research and development of novel haptic technologies and interactions. He was previously a teaching and research assistant at the University of Ottawa from Jan 2005 to May 2013. He has more than 35 academic papers and pending patent applications. He is the recipient of the best paper award at the 2015 QoMEX workshop. He is the technical co-chair of the 2015 Haptic Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE) Workshop and the co-organizer of the 2015 QoMEX workshop special session on quality of experience in haptics. His research interests include haptic applications, medical simulations, and quality of experience for multimedia haptics.

Abdulmotaleb El Saddik is Distinguished University Professor and University Research Chair in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. He is an internationally-recognized scholar who has made strong contributions to the knowledge and understanding of multimedia computing, communications and applications. He has authored and co-authored four books and more than 450 publications. Chaired more than 50 conferences and workshop and has received research grants and contracts totaling more than $18 Mio. He has supervised more than 100 researchers. He received several international awards, among others ACM Distinguished Scientist, Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineers and Fellow of IEEE and IEEE Canada Computer Medal.

Jihad Mohamed Alja’am received the Ph.D. degree, MS. degree and BSc degree in computing from Southern University (The National Council for Scientific Research, CNRS), France. He was with IBM-Paris as Project Manager and with RTS-France as IT Consultant for several years. He is currently with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Qatar University. His current research interests include multimedia, assistive technology, learning systems, human–computer interaction, stochastic algorithms, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and natural language processing. Dr. Alja’am is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Soft Computing, American Journal of Applied Sciences, Journal of Computing and Information Sciences, Journal of Computing and Information Technology, and Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence. He acted as a scientific committee member of different international conferences (ACIT, SETIT, ICTTA, ACTEA, ICLAN, ICCCE, MESM, ICENCO, GMAG, CGIV, ICICS, and ICOST). He is a regular reviewer for the ACM computing review and the journal of supercomputing. He has collaborated with different researchers in Canada, France, Malaysia, and USA. He published so far 138 papers, 8 books chapters in computing and information technology which are published in conference proceedings, scientific books, and international journals. He is leading a research team in multimedia and assistive technology and collaborating in the Financial Watch and Intelligent Document Management System for Automatic Writer Identification projects.

Awardee

ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) is pleased to present the 2015 SIGMM Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award to Dr. Ting Yao and Honorable Mention recognition to Dr. Britta Meixner.

The award committee considers Dr. Yao’s dissertation entitled “Multimedia Search by Self, External, and Crowdsourcing Knowledge” worthy of the recognition as the thesis proposes an innovative knowledge transfer framework for multimedia search which is expected to have significant impact, especially in boosting the search performance for big multimedia data.

Dr. Yao’s thesis proposes the knowledge transfer methodology in three multimedia search scenarios:

1. Seeking consensus among multiple modalities in the context of search re-ranking,
2. Leveraging external knowledge as a prior to be transferred to a problem that belongs to a domain different from the external knowledge, and
3. Exploring the large user click-through data as crowdsourced human intelligence for annotation and search.

The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been successfully justified by thorough experiments. The proposed framework has substantial contributions in principled integration of multimodal data which is indispensable in multimedia search. The publications related to the thesis clearly demonstrate the major impact of this work in many research disciplines including multimedia, web, and information retrieval. The fact that parts of the proposed techniques have been and are being transferred to the commercial search service Bing further attest to the practical contributions of this thesis. Overall, the committee recognizes the significant impact and contributions presented in the thesis to the multimedia community.

Bio of Awardee

Dr. Ting Yao is an associate researcher in the Multimedia Search and Mining group at Microsoft Research, Beijing, China. His research interests are in multimedia search and computing. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at City University of Hong Kong in 2014. He received the B.Sc. degree in theoretical and applied mechanics (2004), B.Eng. double degree in electronic information engineering (2004), and M.Eng. degree in signal and information processing (2008) all from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. The system designed by him achieved the second place in the THUMOS action recognition challenge at CVPR 2015. He was also the principal designer of the image retrieval systems that achieved the third and fifth performance in the MSR-Bing image retrieval challenge at ACM MM 2014 and 2013, respectively. He received the Best Paper Award of ACM ICIMCS (2013).

Honorable Mention

The award committee is pleased to present the Honorable Mention to Dr. Britta Meixner for the thesis entitled: “Annotated Interactive Non-linear Video – Software Suite, Download and Cache Management.”

The thesis presents a fully functional software suite for authoring non-linear interactive videos with downloading and cache management mechanisms for effective video playback. The committee is significantly impressed by the thorough study presented in the thesis with extensive analysis of the properties of the software suite. The implementation which has been made available as open source software along with the thesis undoubtedly has very high potential impact to the multimedia community.

Bio of Awardee

Dr. Britta Meixner received her Master’s degree (German Diplom) in Computer Science from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2008. Furthermore, she received the First State Examination for Lectureship at Secondary Schools for the subjects Computer Science and Mathematics from the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture in 2008. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2014. The title of her thesis is “Annotated Interactive Non-linear Video – Software Suite, Download and Cache Management.” She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow with the University of Passau, Germany, and will be a postdoctoral research fellow at FXPAL, Palo Alto, CA, USA, starting October 2015. Her research interest is mainly in hypermedia. She is an award winner of the 2015 Award “Women + Media Technology,” granted by Germany’s public broadcasters ARD and ZDF (ARD/ZDF Förderpreis “Frauen + Medientechnologie” 2015). She was a Reviewer for Springer Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) Journal, an Organizer of the “International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption (WSICC)” at ACM TVX in 2014 and 2015, and Associate Chair at ACM TVX2015.

ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) is pleased to present this year’s Rising Star Award in multimedia computing, communications and applications to Dr. Yu-Gang Jiang. The ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award recognizes a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of multimedia computing, communication and applications during the early part of his or her career. Dr. Yu-Gang Jiang has made fundamental contributions in the area of video analysis and retrieval, especially with innovative approaches to large-scale video concept detection. He has been an active leader in exploring the bag-of-visual-words (BoW) representation for concept detection, providing influential insights on the critical representation design. He proposed the important idea of “soft-weighting” in his CIVR 2007paper, which significantly advanced the performance of visual concept detection. Dr. Jiang has proposed several important techniques for video and image search. In 2009, he proposed a novel domain adaptive concept selection method for concept-based video search. His method selects the most relevant concepts for a given query considering not only the semantic concept-to-query relatedness but also the data distribution in the target domain. Recently he proposed a method that generates query-adaptive hash codes for improved visual search, with which a finer-grained ranking of search results can be achieved compared to the traditional hashing based methods. His most recent work is in the emerging field of video content recognition by deep learning, where he proposed a comprehensive deep learning framework to model static, short-term motion and long-term temporal information in videos. Very promising results were obtained on the widely used UCF101 dataset. As a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University and later as a faculty member at Fudan University, Dr. Jiang has devoted significant efforts to video event recognition, a problem that is receiving increasing attention in the multimedia community. His extensive contributions in this area include not only innovative algorithm design, but also large benchmark construction, system development, and survey tutorials. He devised a comprehensive system in 2010 using multimodal features, contextual concepts and temporal clues, which won the multimedia event detection (MED) task in NIST TRECVID 2010. He constructed the Columbia Consumer Video (CCV) benchmark in 2011, which has been widely used. Recently, he continues to lead major efforts in creating and sharing large-scale video datasets in critical areas (including 200+ event categories and 100,000 partially copy videos) as community resources. The high impact of his works is reflected by the high number of citations of his work. His recent paper on video search result organization received the Best Poster Paper Award at ACMMM 2014. His shared benchmark datasets and source codes have been used worldwide. In addition, he has made extensive contributions to the professional communities by serving as conference program chairs, invited speakers, and tutorial experts. In summary, Dr. Yu-Gang Jiang receives the 2015 ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award for his significant contributions in the areas of video content recognition and search.

The 2015 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Prof. Dr. Tat-Seng Chua. The award is given in recognition of his pioneering contributions to multimedia, text and social media processing. Tat-Seng Chua is a leading researcher in multimedia, text and social media analysis and retrieval. He is one of the few researchers who has made substantial contributions in the fields of multimedia, information retrieval and social media. Dr. Chua’s contributions in multimedia dates back to the early 1990s, where he was among the first to work on image retrieval with relevance feedback (1991), video retrieval and sequencing by exploring metadata and cinematic rules (1995), and fine grained image retrieval at segment level (1995). These works helped shape the development of the field for many years. Given the limitation of visual content analysis, his research advocates the integration of text, metadata and visual contents coupled with domain knowledge for large-scale media analysis. He developed a multi-source, multi-modal and multi-resolution framework together with the involvement of human in the loop for such analysis and retrieval tasks. This has helped his group not only publish papers in top conferences and journals, but also achieve top positions in large-scale video evaluations when his group participated in TRECVID in 2000-2006, VideOlympics in 2007-09, as well as winning the highly competitive Star (Multimedia) Challenge in 2008. Leveraging the experience, he developed a large-scale multi-label image test set named NUS-WIDE, which has been widely used with over 600 citations. He recently started a company named ViSenze Pte Ltd (www.visenze.com) to commercialize his research in mobile visual fashion search. In his more recent research work in multimedia question-answering (MMQA), he developed a joint text-visual model to exploit correlation between text queries, text-based answers, and visual concepts in images and videos to return both relevant text and video answers. The early work was carried out in the domain of news video (2003), which has motivated several follow-on works in image QA. His recent works tackled the more complicated “how-to” type QA in product domains (2010-13). His recent works (2013-14) exploited SemanticNet to perform attribute-based image retrieval and use of various types of domain knowledge. His current work aims to build a live, continuous-learning system to support the dynamic annotation and retrieval of images and micro videos in social media streams. In information retrieval and social media research, Dr. Chua focused on the key problems of organizing large-scale unstructured text contents to support question-answering (QA). His works point towards the use of linguistics and domain knowledge for effective large-scale information analysis, organization and retrieval. Given his strong interest in both multimedia and text processing, it is natural for him to venture into social media research that involves the analysis of text, multimedia, and social network contents. His group developed a live social observatory system to carry out research in building descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics of multiple live social media streams. The system has been well recognized by peers. His recent work on “multi-screen social TV” won the 2015 Best IEEEE Multimedia Best paper Award. Dr. Chua has been involved in most key conferences in these areas by serving as general chair, technical program chair, or invited keynote speaker as well as by leading innovative research and winning many best paper or best student paper awards in recent years. He is the Steering Committee Chair of two international multimedia conference series: ACM ICMR (International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval) and MMM (MultiMedia Modeling). In summary, he is an extraordinarily accomplished and outstanding researcher in multimedia, text and social media processing, truly exemplifying the characteristics of the ACM SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions.