1. Why Do We Call It Multimedia? Masahito Hirakawa Shimane University, Japan

2. Multiplicity is nice? The term multimedia reminds us of the existence of multiple media. Is it really essential to identify text, picture, voice, and others in a content? The number of media being adopted is no concern of us. Everything supports multimedia nowadays. What is important is how natural and fit the media is in a target application.

3. An example Gal-Moji (characters of young girls) or Heta-Moji (awkward characters)  Some - mostly young girls - in Japan recognize Hiragana characters as images and enjoy forming a sentence by a combination of completely irrelevant characters.  Examples  They don’t care about the type of media. What they are interested in is how much the expressiveness of media is.

4. A sweet example We would say, it’s a (cheese) cake! We don’t care what the ingredients are - cheese, cracker, sour cream, sugar, butter, lemon juice, …

5. Media summary No boarder in (multi)media.  Reference - M. Hirakawa, “From MultiMedia to UniversalMedia,” International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering (to appear). (Some) research projects in my lab towards the goal  Media understanding  Interacting with water

6. Media understanding How do media convey the information and affect people? - the way of their understanding and thinking. A trial: automatic generation of images from narrative text – let’s make a picture book!  Text analysis: scene detection, key character identification  Image generation: assignment of gesture, positioning of characters, and camera work control

7. Media understanding A sample resultant image for "A Little Princess“ -- for the scene where Sara is scolded for being sad

8. Interacting with water Emotional aspect (e.g., touching water generates waves)

9. A challenge over semantics We may not catch the meaning of an object as is presented in its expression. Illusion is an example. We are most likely to specify domain knowledge as complete as possible. Completeness may not be the final goal. What is more important is that the user feels natural.