SIGMM Retreat Report on Future

The ACM Multimedia Special Interest Group was created ten years ago. Since that time, researchers have solved a number of important problems related to media processing, multimedia databases, and distributed multimedia applications. A strategic retreat was organized as part of ACM Multimedia 2003 to assess the current state of multimedia research and suggest directions for future research. This report presents the recommendations developed during the retreat. The major observation is that research in the past decade has significantly advanced hardware and software support for distributed multimedia applications and that future research should focus on identifying and delivering applications that impact users in the real-world. The retreat suggested the community focus on solving three grand challenges: 1) make authoring complex multimedia titles as easy as using a word processor or drawing program, 2) make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments, and 3) make capturing, storing, finding, and using digital media an everyday occurrence in our computing environment. The focus of multimedia researchers should be on applications that incorporate correlated media, fuse data from different sources, and use context to improve application performance.