For the second time in just three years, Ramesh Jain, Bren Professor of Computer Science, has won the IEEE MultiMedia “Best Department Article” award. This year, he received the award for “Social-Sensed Multimedia Computing,” which he co-authored with Peng Cui and Wenwu Zhu of Tsinghua University, China, and Tat-Seng Chua of the National University of Singapore.
“I was pleased but surprised that I was on the winning team for the best paper award,” says Jain, adding that it was “a team effort lead by Professor Cui.”
The paper proposes a paradigm for bringing social media into the loop of multimedia computing to address questions such as whether knowledge sensed from YouTube could help design a recommendation system for TV programs, or if Flickr could be used to improve Google image searches.
Jain, who is also the director of UCI’s Institute for Future Health, won the same award in 2016 for “Let’s Weave the Visual Web,” which discusses the evolution of visual documentation and applications that might emerge from visual knowledge that transcends traditional language-dependent knowledge mechanisms. One example he provides in the paper is how a farmer in India could capture and share only visual knowledge to collaborate with farmers in China and Brazil on research in agriculture.
This image from Jain’s article shows the multimedia technology lifecycle. Understanding and predicting which multimedia content users need in different situations and contexts— the last-mile technology for delivering multimedia services—has not been well studied.
IEEE MultiMedia was one of the first research journals specifically dedicated to the multimedia research field, and over the past 20 years, it has helped initiate and shape some of the major research themes and events in the multimedia field. To recognize the profound contributions of its authors, IEEE MultiMedia established the Best Paper Award (for regular papers and special issue papers) and Best Department Article Award (for department articles) in 2015.
This year’s awards will be presented during a banquet on July 25 at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) in San Diego.
— Shani Murray