At ACM Multimedia 2016, the Brave New Ideas Track was devoted to the theme "Societal Impact of Multimedia Research". In the Call for Papers, we challenged authors to be brave in pursuing topics that have a direct impact on people's lives.
What is brave about multimedia research with societal impact? The answer is simple: it takes much more time. To pursue work with direct societal impact it is necessary to work together with other disciplines, create new data resources, and develop new evaluation methodologies that demonstrate success with respect to socially relevant criteria.
It also takes time for researchers to reach the insight that important new scientific questions arise from directly attempting to create solutions for societal problems. For example, concerns about privacy are currently motivating researchers to turn away from pursuit of "data greedy" algorithms to study how to get more out of less data.
We recommend reading the papers of the track to understand other interesting scientific problems that have been opened up by researchers who have the courage to work in these high societal-impact areas:
Mengfan Tang, Siripen Pongpaichet, and Ramesh Jain. 2016. Research Challenges in Developing Multimedia Systems for Managing Emergency Situations. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (MM '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 938-947. [ACM DL link][slides]
Andrea Castelletti, Roman Fedorov, Piero Fraternali, and Matteo Giuliani. 2016. Multimedia on the Mountaintop: Using Public Snow Images to Improve Water Systems Operation. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (MM '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 948-957. [ACM DL link][paper][slides]
Alexis Joly, Hervé Goëau, Julien Champ, Samuel Dufour-Kowalski, Henning Müller, and Pierre Bonnet. 2016. Crowdsourcing Biodiversity Monitoring: How Sharing your Photo Stream can Sustain our Planet. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (MM '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 958-967. [ACM DL link][paper][slides] See also: the Pl@ntNet App.
Michael Riegler, Mathias Lux, Carsten Gridwodz, Concetto Spampinato, Thomas de Lange, Sigrun L. Eskeland, Konstantin Pogorelov, Wallapak Tavanapong, Peter T. Schmidt, Cathal Gurrin, Dag Johansen, Håvard Johansen, and Pål Halvorsen. 2016. Multimedia and Medicine: Teammates for Better Disease Detection and Survival. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference (MM '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 968-977. [ACM DL link][paper][slides]
Contact: ACM MM 2016 BNI Chairs: Martha Larson (TU Delft and Radboud University Nijmegen) and Hari Sundaram (University of Illinois)
