Academia Meets Industry at the Multimedia Grand Challenge

For many years, people have consumed more multimedia content than written information. Yet the tools consumers use to find the content they want to see are often based on text. Hence, despite years of vibrant research, the multimedia field has been criticized for a lack of real-world applications. A recent panel discussion on multimedia search had the revealing title: Multimedia Information Retrieval: What Is It, and Why Isn’t Anyone Using It? With the exception of face recognition and optical character recognition, little of the wonderful technology created by the multimedia community has met with commercial success. Search engines look for multimedia content on the basis of the text around the object. Recommendation engines do better by ignoring the content completely and correlating user’s rating data instead. The ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge was designed to bring such commercial needs to the attention of researchers. Seven industrial partners led the Multimedia Grand Challenge by identifying issues they think are important to their business and worth further study.