UCMedia 2010

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Users are always central to media: as creators, as consumers, as learners or as the public whose buying habits have, for generations, been influenced by advertisers (and so paid for the creation and distribution of media). The role of the user in the media value chain changes with technology. User-centric media are the product of the changes that happened in the last 5 years in the way the users consume, interact and behave in the Internet. The explosion of user-generated contents and social networks requires a shift of the market to new business models for sharing, exchanging, delivering and experiencing multimedia. New technical challenges arises from the need of providing these new services efficiently through the value chain and user-centric media technologies are emerging as one of pillars of the future “Media Internet”.

The ICST International Conference on User Centric Media, UCMedia, was initiated in 2009 in Venice, Italy, to provide a unique international forum for researchers in the field of user-centric multimedia technologies and to improve the understanding of the changing landscape of media. The conference aims at involving all portions of the different media value chains, from creatives, through service providers, technology enablers and users/consumers, supporting inventive and creative practices in the arts, in science, in engineering and in business, encouraging publications that help to understand, to predict and to enable trends in the relationship between users and media.

The 2^nd International ICST Conference on User Centric Media was held on September 1-3, in Palma, in the beautiful island of Majorca (Spain), an extraordinarily beautiful place in the Mediterranean, with crystal-clear waters and an ideal weather. In this edition, it has been given a particular focus on recent and anticipated advances in user centric media creation, discovery, distribution and consumption in Future Media Internet, and their applications to entertainment, education, information and arts.

UCMedia 2010 had two high-quality quality keynotes, Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, known for his work on the area of telecommunications and digital media, by many considered the father of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and founder of the Digital Media Project (DMP); and Dr. Theodore Zahariadis, active in the EU Future Internet Assembly (FIA) activities where he coordinates the Future Media Internet subgroup, and Assoc. Professor at the Technological Educational Institution of Chalkida.

The Technical Program included 16 high quality papers divided in seven Technical Sessions, each of them focused on different aspects of user-centric media. In addition, the conferenced hosted the 4th InterMedia Open Forum workshop on the first day of the conference.

The first day of the Technical Program was opened by the keynote of Dr. Chiariglione “User-centred media - but who is the user?”, exploring how traditional roles in media value chain can be mapped to a digital world and what benefits such a mapping may bring. The keynote was followed by an interesting discussion on the technologies, standards and approaches that will make the difference on the future of User Centric Media . The presentation of the papers of the first day where divided on four Technical Sessions on “Personalised access to multimedia content”, “Search and retrieval of networked multimedia content”, “Multimedia & User Experience” and “Video quality perception and user quality of experience”. At the end of the day attendees were warmly welcomed at the Bellver Castle, with a reception offered by local council.

The second day was opened by the keynote of Dr. Zahariadis on “Future Media Internet Architectures”, providing interesting views of future media delivery. The keynote was followed by the presentation of the papers of the Technical Sessions on “User generated content”, “Content distribution” and “Content summarisation”.

At the end of the conference, the Best Paper Award was awared to Gokce Nur, Safak Dogan, Hemantha Kodikara Arachchi, and Ahmet M. Kondoz for their paper “Assessing the Effects of Ambient Illumination Change in Usage Environment on 3D Video Perception for User Centric Media Access and Consumption”.

UCMedia 2010 was organized by ICST, with the technical cooperation of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), technical sponsorship of CREATE-NET and the nextMEDIA Coordinated Action, the local support of the Universitat de les Illes Balears, and had Opinno and the MIT Technology Review as media partners.

The next edition of the conference will be held in Corfu, Greece. If you want to find out more on this and next edition of UCMedia, please visit the conference website at http://www.usercentricmedia.org/ or the conference YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/UserCentricMedia.