Interview Column – Introduction

The interviews in the SIGMM records aim to provide the community with the insights, visions, and views from outstanding researchers in multimedia. With the interviews we particularly try to find out what makes these researchers outstanding and also to a certain extend what is going on in their mind, what are their visions and what are their thoughts about current topics. Examples from the last issues include interviews with Judith Redi, Klara Nahrstedt, and Wallapak Tavanapong.

The interviewers are conducted via Skype or — even better — in person by meeting them at conferences or other community events. We aim to publish three to four interviews a year. If you have suggestions for who to interview, please feel free to contact one of the column editors, which are:

Michael Alexander Riegler is a scientific researcher at Simula Research Laboratory. He received his Master’s degree from Klagenfurt University with distinction and finished his PhD at the University of Oslo in two and a half years. His PhD thesis topic was efficient processing of medical multimedia workloads.
His research interests are medical multimedia data analysis and understanding, image processing, image retrieval, parallel processing, gamification and serious games, crowdsourcing, social computing and user intentions. Furthermore, he is involved in several initiatives like the MediaEval Benchmarking initiative for Multimedia Evaluation, which runs this year the Medico task (automatic analysis of colonoscopy videos, http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2017/medico/.

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Herman Engelbrecht is one of the directors at the MIH Electronic Media Laboratory at Stellenbosch University. He is a lecturer in Signal Processing at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His responsibilities in the Electronic Media Laboratory are the following: Managing the immediate objectives and research activities of the Laboratory; regularly meeting with postgraduate researchers and their supervisors to assist in steering their research efforts towards the overall research goals of the Laboratory; ensuring that the Laboratory infrastructure is developed and maintained; managing interaction with external contractors and service providers; managing the capital expenditure of the Laboratory; and managing the University’s relationship with the post­graduate researchers – See more at: http://ml.sun.ac.za/people/dr-ha-engelbrecht/#sthash.3SexKFo5.dpuf

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Mathias Lux is associate professor at the Institute for Information Technology (ITEC) at Klagenfurt University. He is working on user intentions in multimedia retrieval and production and emergent semantics in social multimedia computing. In his scientific career he has (co-) authored more than 80 scientific publications, has served in multiple program committees and as reviewer of international conferences, journals and magazines, and has organized multiple scientific events. Mathias Lux is also well known for the development of the award winning and popular open source tools Caliph & Emir and LIRe (http://www.semanticmetadata.net) for multimedia information retrieval. Dr. Mathias Lux received his M.S. in Mathematics 2004, his Ph.D. in Telematics 2006 from Graz University of Technology, both with distinction, and his Habilitation (venia docendi) from Klagenfurt University in 2013.

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Introduction to the Opinion Column

Welcome to the SIGMM Community Discussion Column! In this very first edition we would like to introduce the column to the community, its objectives and main operative characteristics.

Given the exponential amount of multimedia data shared online and offline everyday, research in Multimedia is of unprecedented importance. We might be now facing a new era of our research field, and we would like the whole community to be involved in the improvement and evolution of our domain.

The column has two main goals. First, we will promote dialogue regarding topics of interests for the MM community, by providing tools for continuous discussion among the members of the multimedia community. Every quarter, we will discuss (usually) one topic via online tools. Topics will include “What is Multimedia, and what is the role of the Multimedia community in science?”; “Diversity and minorities in the community”; “The ACM code of ethics”; etc.

Second, we will monitor and summarize on-going discussions, and spread their results within and outside the community. Every edition of this column will then summarize the discussion, highlighting popular and non-popular opinions, agreed action points and future work.

To foster the discussion, we set up an online discussion forum to which all members of the multimedia community (expertise and seniority mixed) can participate: the Facebook MM Community Discussion group (follow this link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/132278853988735/) . For every edition of the column, we will choose an initial set of topics of high relevance for the community. We will include, for example, topics that have been previously discussed at ACM meetings (e.g., the code of ethics), or in related events (e.g., Diversity at MM Women lunch), or popular off-line discussions among MM researchers (e.g., review processes, vision of the scientific community…). In the first 15 days of the quarter, the members of the community will choose one topic from this short-list via an online poll shared through the MM Facebook group. We will then select the topic that received the higher number of votes as the subject for the quarterly discussion.

Volunteers or selected members of the MM group will start the discussion via Facebook posts on the group page. The discussion will be then open for a period of a month. All members of the community can participate by replying to posts or by directly posting on the group page, describing their point of view on the subject while being concise and clear. During this period, we will monitor and moderate (when needed) the discussion. At the end of the month, we will summarise the discussion by describing its evolution, exposing major and minor opinions, outlining highlights and lowlights. A final text with the summary and some relevant discussion extracts will be prepared and will appear in the SIGMM Records and in the Facebook “MM Community page”: https://www.facebook.com/MM-Community-217668705388738/.

Hopefully, the community will benefit from this initiative by either reaching some consensus or by pointing out important topics that are not mature enough and require further exploration. In the long-term, we hope these process will make the community evolve through large consensus and bottom-up discussions.

Let’s contribute and foster research around topics of high interest for the community!

Xavi and Miriam

Xavier Almeda-PinedaDr. Xavier Alameda-Pineda (Xavi) is research scientist at INRIA. Xavi’s interdisciplinary background (Msc in Mathematics, Telecommunications and Computer Science) grounded him to pursue his PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science, and a further post-doc in the University of Trento. His research interests are signal processing, computer vision and machine learning for scene and behavior understanding using multimodal data. He is the winner of the best paper award of ACM MM 2015, the best student paper award at IEEE WASPAA 2015 and the best scientific paper award at IAPR ICPR 2016.

 

 

 

Mariam RediDr. Miriam Redi is a research scientist in the Social Dynamics team at Bell Labs Cambridge. Her research focuses on content-based social multimedia understanding and culture analytics. In particular, Miriam explores ways to automatically assess visual aesthetics, sentiment, and creativity and exploit the power of computer vision in the context of web, social media, and online communities. Previously, she was a postdoc in the Social Media group at Yahoo Labs Barcelona and a research scientist at Yahoo London. Miriam holds a PhD from the Multimedia group in EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis.