| READINGS in Multimedia Computing is a collection of seminal research papers culled from the literature of the last ten years. Although the origins of multimedia computing and networking can be traced back to the development of systems such as the AT&T Picturephone in the late 1960s, it wasn't until the 1990s that the field came into its own.
The development and mass marketing of the "cheap" personal computer with a CD-ROM drive and a processor powerful enough to process and display multimedia streams enabled the widespread development of multimedia applications for education and training, as well as entertainment and gaming. The privatization and the accessibility of the Internet motivated the use of personal computers as communication devices that could integrate applications such as audio and video conferencing into your desktop computing environment to create a computer-supported collaborative system. And then came the World Wide Web! The text and command-line oriented applications such as ftp and gopher were replaced overnight by Web browsers, and shared files were largely replaced by multimedia Web pages and streaming media. These developments fueled a boom in multimedia research. Indeed, virtually every subdiscipline of computer science research has considered the problem of supporting or processing multimedia data types. As a result, the field of multimedia computing is spread out across such diverse fields as image and signal processing, user interface design, operating systems, computer-supported cooperative work, networking, databases, and programming languages. To gain an overall perspective on the field you would have to search numerous proceedings and journals and follow the threads of research across several communities.
The goal of this text is to provide a roadmap through the field of multimedia computing and networking. We have assembled a dozen of the leading multimedia researchers and charged them with selecting the most important papers in their area of expertise. Each set of papers is presented as a chapter in the readings with an introduction to the field and the selected papers written by the chapter editor. By reading a given chapter you will learn about the fundamental problems, solutions, and research trends in a specific area of importance in multimedia computing. Given the chapter introductions, the papers are accessible to most professional computer scientists as well as graduate students and advanced undergraduates. |