********************* CALL FOR PAPERS ********************* Submission deadline extended to November 8, 2010 SPECIAL ISSUE ON Multimedia Semantic Computing International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM) Guest Editors: Chengcui Zhang, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA Hongli Luo, Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA Min Chen, University of Montana, USA INTRODUCTION: Recent advances in storage, hardware, information technology, communication and networking have resulted in a large amount of multimedia data, such as image, audio and video. Multimedia data is used in a wide range of applications of entertainment, digital libraries, health care, and distant learning. Efficient methods to extract knowledge from multimedia content have attracted the interests of a large research community. The volume of multimedia data presents great challenges in data analysis, indexing, retrieval, distribution and management. The increasing popularity of mobile device, such as smart phones, PDA, has demands for pervasive multimedia service which can adapt video contents to match users’ preferences. New research trends such as semantic computing, multi-modality interaction and cross-mining, cooperative processing, new multimedia standard (e.g., MPEG-21), Quality of Service (QoS), and security social networking provide both challenges and opportunities for multimedia research. Semantic computing can be defined as “Computing with (Machine processable) Description of Content and Intentions.” Semantic technique can be used to extract the content of multimedia, texts, services, and structured data. The scope of semantic computing is now extended to many domains and applications such as information retrieval, knowledge management, natural language processing and data mining. Semantic can enrich the methods of multimedia research and brings new research area in multimedia semantic computing. Multimedia semantic computing is the application of semantic computing to multimedia data. Researches in multimedia application can exploit the richness of semantic to enhance the performances of services. The understanding of multimedia data at the semantic level can bring new research methods to various domains of multimedia applications such as signal processing, content-based retrieval, and data mining. The application of semantic computing to multimedia is further motivated by the human-computer interaction in multimedia management. The convergence of semantic and multimedia facilitates the management, use and understanding of data in traditional multimedia applications such as multimedia analysis, indexing, annotation, retrieval, delivery and management. While multimedia semantic computing changes the multimedia application and service via semantic concepts, several issues related to semantic modeling and visual analysis still remain challenging. One of the major challenging research topics is how to bridge the gap between low-level features of multimedia data and the high-level meanings of multimedia contents. Low-level features such as color, texture and shape can be automatically extracted from the multimedia data. How to model the semantic concepts based on the low-level feature is the prerequisite for multimedia analysis and indexing. The high-level semantic concepts of multimedia data can facilitate content-based applications, for example, image/video classification, retrieval of image and event of particular interest in the video. Semantic features can also be integrated with other techniques, such as user relevance feedback, annotations, multimodalities and metadata management, to efficiently and effectively retrieve! the multimedia data. The emerging pervasive multimedia computing applications deliver and present data to mobile users. Rich semantic of multimedia data can be exploited in context-aware computing application to provide personalized services. The provision of the data is envisioned to be adaptive to the location, time, devices and user preferences. Challenges related to this issue include the representation of context of multimedia data using semantic concepts, semantic user interface, and personalization for interface with multimedia data. OBJECTIVE OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE: The goal of this special issue is to show some of the current research in the area of multimedia semantic computing. To this aim, we will bring together a number of high-quality and relevant papers that discuss the state-of-the-art research on semantic-based multimedia systems, present theoretic framework and practical implementations, and identify challenges and open issues in multimedia semantic modeling and integration. The special issue calls for research in various domains and applications, including pervasive multimedia computing systems, personalized multimedia information retrieval systems which adapt to the user's needs, integration of semantic content and schema from distributed multimedia sources so that the user sees a unified view of heterogeneous data, clustering and classification of semantically tied information in different multimedia modalities, security issues in multimedia/hypertext systems, and so forth. We hope this special issue will show a broad picture of the emerging semantic multimedia research. RECOMMENDED TOPICS: Topics to be discussed in this special issue include (but are not limited to) the following: · Distributed multimedia systems · Human-centered multimedia computing · Image/video/audio databases · Mobile multimedia computing · Multimedia assurance and security · Multimedia data mining · Multimedia data modeling · Multimedia data storage · Multimedia data visualization · Multimedia retrieval (image, video, audio, etc.) · Multimedia streaming and networking · Multimodal data analysis and interaction · Novel applications, such as biomedical multimedia computing and multimedia forensics · Semantic content analysis · Semantic integration and meta-modeling · Social network analysis from a multimedia perspective SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit papers for this special theme issue on Multimedia Semantic Computing on or before October 18, 2010. All submissions must be original and may not be under review by another publication. INTERESTED AUTHORS SHOULD CONSULT THE JOURNAL’S GUIDELINES FOR MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS at http://www.igi-global.com/development/author_info/guidelines submission.pdf. All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind, peer review basis. Papers must follow APA style for reference citations. ABOUT International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM): The primary objective of the International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM) is to promote and advance multimedia research from different aspects in multimedia data engineering and management. It provides a forum for university researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers and graduate students who need to be become acquainted with new theories, algorithms, and technologies in multimedia engineering, and to all those who wish to gain a detailed technical understanding of what multimedia engineering involves. Novel and fundamental theories, algorithms, technologies, and applications will be published to support this mission. This journal is an official publication of the Information Resources Management Association www.igi-global.com/ijmdem Editor-in-Chief: Shu-Ching Chen Published: Quarterly (both in Print and Electronic form) PUBLISHER: The International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM) is published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference) and “Medical Information Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. All submissions should be directed to the attention of: Chengcui Zhang Guest Editor International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management E-mail: zhang@cis.uab.edu