Multimedia 2017 - SPECIAL SESSION ON Multimedia and E-Learning

Ever since multimedia has started to coalesce as a field, there has been the vision that it would be useful for education. However, the reality is that progress had been slow compared to other advances in the field. The big game-changing developments come through the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), where universities and educational organizations are providing course materials online, usually in the form of video, slide and text. The multimedia learning materials can also be combined with other related online materials such as YouTube and Wikipedia. Online courses can now reach hundreds of thousands of students, who could previously not afford the costs associated with higher education or live in remote areas without access to quality educational services. The new opportunity is that we now have test-beds to conduct large-scale evaluations of research to improve learning through better teaching methods, discovering and applying principles of human learning and validate the research through empirical tests with statistical validity. This is especially a problem ideally suited for multimedia research since it will require exploration of all types of visual, audio, graphic, language and social information to understand what is likely to result in effective teaching approaches.
Topics of Interest
We will primarily seek two kinds of papers:
Position papers: These papers can address various aspects of multimedia and e-learning. We will prefer position papers that are backed up by recent results, which could be already published or appear first in the paper.
Research papers: These papers should present recent and relevant research results that may have deep implications for e-learnings.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Learning media content analysis
Support for audio/visual lecture summarization, segmentation and chaptering
Multimodal (slides, notes, lectures, etc) course material alignment
Learning & content management systems
Ontology and knowledge management in e-learning
Multimedia courseware development
Multi-modal learning content delivery
Infrastructure of e-learning environments
Organizers
Vincent Oria, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
OriaVincent Oria is a professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in the USA. His research interests include multimedia databases, spatio-temporal databases, and similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. He has served on the program committees of several multimedia conferences including ACM Multimedia, ACM ICMR and MMM; and also database conferences including SIGMOD and ICDE. He is the recipient of the 2014 Outstanding Achievement in Research Award for the NJIT College of Computing Sciences and 2015 ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award. He is also currently serving on the computer science advisory board of the University of the People (uopeople.edu), an online tuition free university.
Alexander G. Hauptmann, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
HauptmannAlexander G. Hauptmann is a Principal Systems Scientist in the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department and a faculty member with CMU’s Language Technologies Institute. His research interests have led him to pursue and combine several different areas: man-machine communication, natural language processing, speech understanding and synthesis, machine learning. He worked on speech and machine translation at CMU from 1984-94, when he joined the Informedia project where he developed the News-on-Demand application. Since then he has conducted research on video analysis and retrieval on broadcast news as well as observational video with success documented by outstanding performance in many video analysis challenges. His current research centers on robust analysis of internet-style and surveillance video as large scale data.