Workshop on Multimedia Challenges, Opportunities and Research Directions

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Human communication and information consumption is multimodal by nature, involving rich data and interaction of various modalities such as text, sound, vision, touch, and more. The field of multimedia has been responsible for developing theoretical foundations, novel methodologies, and effective system designs for integrating data of heterogeneous modalities to extract useful information, enhance interaction, and deliver optimal user experiences in different multimedia applications. Today the use of advanced multimedia solutions is pervasive in myriad applications and platforms such as social media, virtual/augmented reality, distributive collaboration and communication, online education, health care, scientific discovery, and many others. Now with the explosive deployment of multimedia devices, processes, and systems, the role of multimedia research has become even more important than ever, influencing our abilities and prospects in advancing state-of-the-art technologies and solving real-world problems underlying various challenges facing the society and the nation in areas like global communication, security, environmental sustainability, health care, education, etc. To respond to these challenges and further advance the frontiers of the field of multimedia, this project aims to develop an ambitious vision and concrete strategic action plans to guide the research directions and plan the critical resources needed in the multimedia field in the next ten years. The project will organize a two-day workshop, in which invited leading researchers and practitioners from academics, industry, and research institutes will work together to brainstorm, discuss, and plan the most important research topics and directions for the multimedia field in the next ten years. Participants will be asked to provide assessment of the state of the art today, share best practices of organizing large-scale collaborative multimedia research, point out weakness and missing solutions and expertise in the community, and identify priority topics and directions that require further efforts and investment by the community and the funding agencies. Other important topics such as taskforce development, university-industry interaction, entrepreneurial translation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and international collaboration will also be discussed. The outcome of the workshop will include a report that integrates input from all participants and conclusions from the workshop. The report and the input shared by the participants will be available for public access on the workshop web site. The workshop report will be disseminated through the mailing lists of the multimedia groups of ACM and IEEE and other professional communities, and will be included in the ACM Digital Library for archival and open access.