Journal of Multimedia Special Issue on Connected Multimedia

Call for Papers

TOPICAL THEME

Social media has received extensive attention recently and has become a very popular research area due to its wide spectrum of applications. We note that even though the whole area of social media is very popular in the literature, there are a group of research issues that are related to the social-cultural constraints in the social media study that have not yet received sufficient attention. In this context, we group all these issues together under the umbrella of a new sub-area of social media that we call connected multimedia.

Consequently, by connected multimedia, we mean the study of the social and technical interactions among users, multimedia data, and devices across cultures and the explicit exploitation of cultural differences. Hence, connected multimedia involves the three elements - the users, the multimedia data, and the devices - with two perspectives - the social focus and the cultural focus. In short, connected multimedia is about multimedia content and connection across community and cultural boundaries. In comparison with those existing research areas including social media as its super-area and human centered computing [11], we here emphasize that connected multimedia pays more attention to the cultural difference. The definition of the social side is broader than just national cultures; it possibly includes cultures of groups, disciplines, organizations, communities, ethnicities, religions, and nations. This emphasis distinguishes connected multimedia from all other existing areas, which may claim to include some of these aspects, among many others.

Following the successful first two editions of the workshop on the newly emerged theme of connected multimedia held in Hangzhou, China, in October of 2009 and in Florence, Italy, in October, 2010, we would like to organize a special issue in this journal on this topical theme -- connected multimedia --- further exploiting social and cultural constraints for distributed multimedia computing.

Examples of the connected multimedia problems include but are not limited to:

Internet multimedia search
Multimodal and networked surveillance
Sensor data understanding and mining
Human behavior understanding under specific cultural constraints
Social network community discovery and tracking
Social relationship identifications in imagery/video data
Multimedia collaborative filtering
Social games

REVIEW PROCESS

Given the fact that connected multimedia is a very young research area and therefore there are not many people who are familiar with this area, we intend to publish this special issue for the contributions from two combined sources. One is based on the open call for papers from all the related communities. The other is from those targeted authors who have done the related work in this topic, in particular, those who presented their work in the two editions of the workshop on this theme.

For contributions from both sources, we will have a peer review process to ensure a papers of high quality will appear in the special issue. At least three reviews shall be solicited before a paper is warranted to publish in this special issue.