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 the high quality of the papers to appear in the special issue. At least three reviews shall be solicited before a paper is warranted to publish in this special issue. GUEST EDITIORS Zhongfei (Mark) Zhang Computer Science Department, Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science SUNY Binghamton Binghamton, NY 13902-6000 USA zhongfei@cs.binghamton.edu Zhengyou Zhang Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 USA zhang@microsoft.com Ramesh Jain Department of Computer Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 USA jain@ics.uci.edu Yueting Zhuang College of Computer Science Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027 P.R. China yzhuang@cs.zju.edu.cn IMPORTANT DATES 1/15/2011: Publicize this special issue 4/15/2011: Deadline of the submissions 6/1/2011: Notifications to authors for the first round of reviews 7/15/2011: Deadline of the revised submissions 8/15/2011: Decisions made for all the accepted papers 10/15/2011: Publication of this special issue