Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstract
Different from traditional and web multimedia computing which are
content-centric, social multimedia computing is essentially user-centric: (1) social
multimedia data is constituted by what users see, listen, think, feel, and speak; (2)
social multimedia analysis and application is toward customized user services. In
this chapter, we first give an overview of social multimedia computing, introduce
the challenges and progresses in this field, and then describe the specifications of
user-centric social multimedia computing. At the end, we outline the structure of this
topic.
1.1 Social Multimedia Computing
With the explosive growth of User-Generated Content (UGC) online, social media,
as one prevalent web service, is playing a significant role in related multimedia
applications, such as image and video understanding [
6
,
33
], multimedia retrieval
[
25
], customized recommendation [
10
], target advertisement [
18
], etc. Social media
is recognized as the means of interactions among people in which they create, share,
and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks [
1
]. It is an
umbrella term to describe various social interactions, covering almost all theWeb 2.0
services such as social networking sites (SNS), photo sharing websites, video sharing
websites, check-in services, micro-bloggings, social games, etc. We summarize the
most popular social media services and platforms into a social media panorama in
Fig.
1.1
.
Multimedia has become the major sharing and interacting medium in various
social media networks since the ubiquitous presence of capturing devices. According
to Alexa statistics, three out of the four fastest growing social media websites around
2012-2013 focus on multimedia sharing, i.e., Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram.
There is a clear multimedialization trend in social media information services. For
example,
Twitter
increases its support on image and video sharing, and releases one
6-second video sharing app named Vine.
Tencent
's audio chatting tool, Weixin, has
attracted more than 300 million users in less than 2 years, which is tending to replace
the traditional short message service (SMS).
