Abstract

Multimedia research over the past decade has resulted in the development of multimedia data managers that have achieved a reasonable level of sophistication. It is possible now to organize images and video data efficiently, model them reasonably well and perform searches on them based on selected features (query-by-example). The development of XML has facilitated the storage and retrieval of structured text. We have, however, not yet fully addressed the more difficult problems: how to capture and model the semantics of the media objects, how to query using these semantic properties, how to exploit the interrelationships among media (how to develop fully multimedia systems), how to architect these systems, and others. In this talk, I will review where we have come and then discuss some of the remaining challenges.

Biographical Information

M. Tamer Özsu is Professor of Computer Science and University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo and Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Prior to his current position, he was with the Department of Computing Science of the University of Alberta between 1984 and 2000.

Dr. Özsu's current research focuses on three areas: (a) Internet-scale data distribution that emphasizes stream data management, peer-to-peer databases, and Web data management; (b) multimedia data management, concentrating on similarity-based retrieval of time series and trajectory data; and (c) structured document management mainly within the context of XML query processing and optimization.

Dr. Özsu is on the editorial boards of ACM Computing Surveys, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Information Technology and Management,WorldWideWeb Journal and Springer Book Series on Advanced Information & Knowledge Processing. He chaired ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) between 2001-2005 and was a trustee of the VLDB Endowment between 1996-2002. He was the Coordinating Editor-in-Chief of The VLDB Journal between 2001-2005. He is a Fellow of ACM and a Senior Member of IEEE; he is the recipient of 2006 ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award.