4th IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Computing (MMC 2017)

The intimate presence of mobile devices in our daily life, such as smartphones and various wearable gadgets like smart watches, has dramatically changed the way we connect with the world around us. Users rely on mobile devices to maintain an always-on relation to information, personal and social networks, etc. Nowadays, in the era of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), these devices are further extended by smart sensors and actuators and amend multimedia devices with additional data and possibilities. With a growing number of powerful embedded mobile sensors like camera, microphone, GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, digital compass, and proximity sensor, there is a variety of data available and hence enables new sensing applications across diverse research domains comprising mobile media analysis, mobile information retrieval, mobile computer vision, mobile social networks, mobile human-computer interaction, mobile entertainment, mobile gaming, mobile healthcare, mobile learning, and mobile advertising. 

Regardless of the application fields, many issues and challenges brought by the emerging technologies for mobile multimedia still lie ahead and many research questions remain to be answered. For example, seamless user experience has been identified as one key factor in designing mobile multimedia applications for multiple form factors. Yet, its provision is challenging and requires effective integration of rich mobile sensors and multidisciplinary research, such as multimedia content adaptation and user behavior analysis. Also, the effective and efficient use of multimedia data on mobile devices, including convenient interaction and appropriate visualization, is still not fully solved. Small screen sizes, integrated cameras and microphones, but also the new gesture and haptic sensors, pose new challenges but at the same time provide new opportunities and innovative ways for multimedia interaction. In addition, for power saving purpose, application-driven energy management is an important technical consideration in mobile multimedia computing (e.g., how to offload computation-intense tasks to the cloud servers to save energy and extend battery lifetimes for mobile users?). In addition to energy optimization, it is often also required to optimize runtime performance when dealing with multimedia data in a mobile scenario (e.g., by usage of specific programming techniques, or by offloading specific parts to the cloud). 

The workshop on Mobile Multimedia Computing (MMC 2017) aims to bring together researchers and professionals from worldwide academia and industry for showcasing, discussing, and reviewing the whole spectrum of technological opportunities, challenges, solutions, and emerging applications in mobile multimedia.