To foster professional excellence and societal contributions, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) established three new awards this year: the Impact, Rising Star and Service awards. Winners were recently announced, and the IEEE TCMC Impact Award went to Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences, Ramesh Jain, for his “pioneering and wide-spread impact to multimedia computing for the past four decades.”

“When I started championing multimedia, the main applications were multimodal communication,” says Jain. “Now, multimodal processing is central to our personal health — the most important thing for every human being.” His perspective is outlined in an article he coauthored with UCI M.D./Ph.D. candidate Nitish Nag in Computer magazine, “A Navigational Approach to Health: Actionable Guidance for Improved Quality of Life.”

— Shani Murray