Editors: Cynthia C. S. Liem, Jochen Huber
There is ‘multi’ in multimedia. Every day, an increasing amount of extremely diverse multimedia content has meaning and purpose to an increasing amount of extremely diverse human users, under extremely diverse use cases. As multimedia professionals, we work in an extremely diverse set of focus areas to enable this, ranging from systems aspects to user factors, which each have their own methodologies and related communities outside of the multimedia field.
In our multimedia publication venues, we see all this work coming together. However, are we already sufficiently aware of the multidisciplinary potential in our field? Do we take sufficient effort to consider our daily challenges under the perspectives and methodologies of radically different disciplines than our own? Do we sufficiently make use of existing experiences in problems related to our own, but studied in neighboring communities? And how can an increased multidisciplinary awareness help and inspire us to take the field further?
Feeling the need for a stage for multi- and interdisciplinary dialogue within the multimedia community—and beyond its borders—we are excited to serve as editors to this newly established multidisciplinary column of SIGMM records. This column will be published as part of the records, in 4 issues per year. Content-wise, we foresee a mix of opinion-based articles on multidisciplinary aspects of multimedia and interviews of peers whose work sits at the intersection of disciplines.
Call for contributions
We can only truly highlight the multidisciplinary merit of our field if the extreme diversity of our community is properly reflected in the contributions to this column. Therefore, in addition to invited articles, we are continuously looking for contributions from the community. Do you work at the junction of multimedia and another discipline? Did you get any important professional insights by interacting with neighboring communities? Do you want to share experiences on bridging towards other communities, or user audiences who are initially unfamiliar with our common interest areas? Can you contribute meta-perspectives on common case studies and challenges in our field? Do you know someone who should be interviewed or featured for this column? Then, please do not hesitate to reach out to us!
We see this column as a great opportunity to shape the multimedia community and raise awareness for multidisciplinary work, as well as neighboring communities. Looking forward to your input!
Cynthia and Jochen
Editor Biographies
Dr. Cynthia C. S. Liem is an Assistant Professor in the Multimedia Computing Group of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and pianist of the Magma Duo. She initiated and co-coordinated the European research project PHENICX (2013-2016), focusing on technological enrichment of symphonic concert recordings with partners such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Her research interests consider music and multimedia search and recommendation, and increasingly shift towards making people discover new interests and content which would not trivially be retrieved. Beyond her academic activities, Cynthia gained industrial experience at Bell Labs Netherlands, Philips Research and Google. She was a recipient of the Lucent Global Science and Google Anita Borg Europe Memorial scholarships, the Google European Doctoral Fellowship 2010 in Multimedia, and a finalist of the New Scientist Science Talent Award 2016 for young scientists committed to public outreach.
Dr. Jochen Huber is a Senior User Experience Researcher at Synaptics. Previously, he was an SUTD-MIT postdoctoral fellow in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab and the Augmented Human Lab at Singapore University of Technology and Design. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and degrees in both Mathematics (Dipl.-Math.) and Computer Science (Dipl.-Inform.), all from Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Jochen’s work is situated at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Human Augmentation. He designs, implements and studies novel input technology in the areas of mobile, tangible & non-visual interaction, automotive UX and assistive augmentation. He has co-authored over 60 academic publications and regularly serves as program committee member in premier HCI and multimedia conferences. He was program co-chair of ACM TVX 2016 and Augmented Human 2015 and chaired tracks of ACM Multimedia, ACM Creativity and Cognition and ACM International Conference on Interface Surfaces and Spaces, as well as numerous workshops at ACM CHI and IUI. Further information can be found on his personal homepage: http://jochenhuber.com