ACM SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications
Arnold W. M. Smeulders · 2017
The 2017 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Prof. Dr. Arnold Smeulders. The award is given in recognition of his outstanding and pioneering contributions to defining and bridging the semantic gap in content-based image retrieval. During the early years of his scientific career Dr. Smeulders studied the invariant fundamentals of lines, shapes, textures and colors. It resulted in several PAMI papers (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence) that are still being cited today. Besides the written record, Arnold always had the drive to showcase academic results in real-world systems. In 1989 he introduced the Diagnostic Encyclopedia Workstation: a system containing 3,000 images from pathology combined with what we would now call a handcrafted ontology. Already then he showed his great ability to generalize results as in 1991 he launched one of the world's first image search engines that combined automatic indexing, interactive retrieval, and evaluation. During this period he was also instrumental in building our community, organizing the first conferences, and defining the semantic gap as the fundamental problem of image retrieval. The end of this era culminated in what became the most cited paper of our discipline: Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years. ....