Press review

Video by Saarländischer Rundfunk "Aktueller Bericht":
"Bilanz: 15 Jahre Forschung in Schloss Dagstuhl" DiVX [17.1 MB], WMV [16.1 MB]
(Author: Jürgen Rinner; March 30, 2005)

The idea for this seminar arose during the ACM Multimedia Conference 2003. In a Strategic Retreat meeting of the SIG Multimedia of the ACM just before the 2003 conference, the question of whether the research community is sufficiently contributing to "real" multimedia research has recently been very vividly discussed in the at this year’s ACM Multimedia conference 2003. From this meeting and its outcome it was clear that there was high demand in discussing what the future of multimedia research is and where it should go. So with this Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop we wanted to invite leading researchers in the field to an open but yet focused forum to formulate and consequently establish future research directions in multimedia in the context of a Dagstuhl perspectives workshop. As the seminar has a broad and visionary goal, we aimed at bringing together not only researchers from different fields but also from different institutions and those with potentially controversial research opinions - to really achieve a leap forward. Venturous position papers were invited for submission before the seminar that would state their view and controversial issues that they want to discuss.

The course of the seminar. During the seminar the positions have been presented and discussed as a starting point for forming discussion groups that would go into details with specific topics and areas in the field. The seminar was structured as such that there was still enough time to discuss research opinions and selected topics both in working groups as well as in plenary. The short presentations and discussions were intended to identify and finally select the "brave new topics" that are used as the starting points for the working groups’ discussions for the next two days. The goal is to stimulate discussions throughout the entire workshop. After the presentation of the participant’s position statements on the first day, in a plenary debate we cluster the topics identified but also of controversy research positions and formed working groups. Each of the group was going into discussion on the following questions:

• What are the real problems?
• What are the small what are the global problems?
• What do day to day users really need?
• What are the fundamental issues of MM here?
• What are the burning open issues in the field?
• Why are they not solved yet?
• Where are the challenges?
• Where do we need to go the next 10 years?
• What will be the results and applications in 2010 and 2015?

The spirit of the Dagstuhl Seminar remains. During the month after the Dagstuhl seminar one could see presentations and publications that referred to the seminar and makes it a lasting success. Interestingly before the seminar the participants that did not know Dagstuhl so far were a bit skeptic about the seminar and its potential value to them it was a pleasure to see the lively and interesting discussions during the seminar. Now, that the discussions started many of the participants would have liked to continue for one or two more days. And even beyond this, from the researchers and work that refers tto this seminar we can see the real value of the seminar.

The future of multimedia research. Motivated by the outcome, the participants and the results we plan to continue with this seminar in the sense of a series in a "multimedia research" series in adequate regularity - in case we get accepted again with a new proposal at Dagstuhl. The organizers would take the opportunity to thank Dagstuhl for the wonderful ambience and their pleasant organization and all our participants for coming to Dagstuhl and making this multimedia research discussion such a pleasure and success.