The final day of the main program of ACM Multimedia was satisfying enough to convince me to try to come back next year. Highlight of the morning was a presentation by researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, who demoed a system which analyzed chat logs to create highlight summaries of live broadcast events. Basically, they looked at chatroom activity during live broadcasts of American football games, and looked for spikes in the rate at which messages were posted. They also recognized emoticons to determine positive or negative affect. They used the resulting data to pick out segments of the broadcast program which corresponded to these positive or negative spikes. By doing so they could create overall highlight summaries or ones geared to particular social groups (my team’s highlight may be your team’s lowlight). A simple idea, but not one I’ve seen actually implemented before.

Photo courtesy of Ramesh Jain’s Flickr feed.

In the afternoon Hongjiang Zhang of Microsoft Research Asia, Ramesh Jain of UC Irvine, Alberto Del Bimbo of the University of Firenze, my advisor Marc Davis, and Rainer Leinhart of the University of Augsburg (shown from left to right, not including Dr. Zhang) debated about the foundations of multimedia computing. This was interesting to me not so much because of the what was being discussed (though that was interesting too), but because it was an opportunity to observe the dynamics of a particular research community. Like my “home” field of information science, the multimedia community struggles with the challenges and opportunities of “interdisciplinary” work, and many of the concerns raised and possible solutions offered at the panel echoed things I hear around SIMS. Ramesh also commented on the panel at his blog, suggesting that the multimedia community is in its “teenage” years.

Later I had tea at the Raffles Hotel with Frank Nack, Dick Bulterman, Wolf-Tilo Balke, and Milena Radenkovic. I was especially glad to have had the chance to talk to Milena a bit about her projects at the Mixed Reality Lab, including a new effort to involve millions of cameraphone users as frontline collectors of scientific data. And of course it was great to have a chance to catch up with Frank again.

All in all it was a good conference and worth the trip. I’ll definitely try to make it to next year’s conference in Santa Barbara, hopefully to present a long paper…