The Interplay of Multiple Disciplines

i As the capturing and processing of digital media data becomes increasingly ubiquitous and effortless, multimedia content has penetrated almost every aspect of our life and work, such as education, communication, and even life assistance, and has brought unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities for developing next generation computing and communication platforms. Multimedia applications are centered on content analysis and delivery and have progressed a long way beyond that nowadays. Multimedia systems rely on the support of technologies from multiple disciplines such as operating systems, networking, signal processing , and system engineering. However, multimedia application systems are not well supported by current operating/computing systems/architectures. Aside from some commonly known issues such as lack of efficient resource management facilities and no support for real time rendering or presentation, a more challenging issue lies in the fact that, with the ever-changing requirements from the user and system perspectives, constant reevaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies is needed. Adaptive HTTP video streaming is one such good example that involves the adap-tion of existing data streaming technologies to suit the dynamically changing needs of devices and different network conditions by encoding the video in multiple target bitrates. The video quality, largely determined by the bitrate, can be changed dynamically to match the varying bandwidth and thus has fewer problems with buffer underflow or data loss. As another example , in many applications, there is a need to efficiently adapt JPEG images to satisfy given constraints such as file size and quality, from ubiquitous media access for mobile devices to multimedia messaging. However, none of these tasks are trivial, and they often command expensive computations and non-negligible resources. Expertise from multiple fields, such as optimization, high performance computing, and even data mining, is much needed to make a practical system when such complex computing tasks are involved. Another pressing issue, while being under-studied for the past decade, is the interoperabil-ity of multimedia systems. Without properly defined APIs and component-based design, it is hard to enable the communication between two different multimedia systems that are built on different platforms and are based on different architectures, and thus it is impossible to standardize the development of interoperable multimedia applications for different systems.