Computing Journal
Publisher: Springer
Guest Editors: Rajiv Ranjan, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Lizhe Wang
*** Call for Papers ***
CISCO (a network technology giant) predicts that by 2016, 90% of internet traffic will be multimedia content (3D images, high resolution video, and audio). In addition to entertainment and advertising applications, the new multimedia content-driven applications in the domain of healthcare, aged-care, surveillance, and education will contribute significantly to this traffic. The new applications? contribution to the traffic will be due to their unprecedented processing (storage, distribution, and indexing) requirements for hundreds of petabytes of content. In the healthcare domain, live as well as archived videos will be used as a medium to educate patients about the aftercare treatment (follow-ups), once the patient is at home. This will include video instructions about how to change the dressing on a healing wound or how to brush their teeth after having braces installed. Other scenario from healthcare domain will arise from the problem of managing petabytes of multimedia content produced by advanced medical imaging devices. In the aged-care domain, health professional will rely on real-time or recorded video feeds from patient?s home to monitor clinical signs and indicators such as skin color, mood, affect, and to determine whether a patient is utilizing devices and medications appropriately. In the surveillance domain, governments, small businesses, and individuals will need to deal with stream of video content from security cameras and perform analytics (event detection, event tracking, and alert generation) on-the-fly for protecting citizens, homes and nations? critical infrastructures. Finally, in the education domain, students will need to have the opportunity to access teachers from home; especially, the students in rural or remote areas need an opportunity to be able to receive interactive lessons or instructions via live video streaming, from specialised teachers or trainers who are not available locally.
In the aforementioned application scenarios: (i) hundreds of petabytes of multimedia content will be generated in real-time as well as offline which will be required to be efficiently processed (stored, distributed, and indexed with a schema and semantics) in a way that does not compromise end-users? Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of content availability, content search delay, content analysis delay, and the like and (ii) the information retrieved from content will be consumed and processed in many places concurrently and collaboratively. Many of the existing ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructures that store, distribute, and index hundreds of petabytes of multimedia content fall short of this challenge or do not exist. Hence, we need more powerful and fast ICT infrastructures that can support scalable storage, indexing, and distribution of petabytes of multimedia content produced by aforementioned applications.
We believe that Cloud computing infrastructures (e.g., Amazon, Microsoft Azure, etc.) in conjunction with fast communication infrastructure will emerge as the platform for hosting and delivering aforementioned multimedia-content driven applications. Cloud computing assembles large networks of virtualised ICT services such as hardware resources (such as CPU, storage, and network), software resources (such as databases, application servers, and web servers) and applications. Cloud computing services are hosted in large data centres, often referred to as data farms, operated by companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsof Azure. In industry these services are referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Cloud computing gives multimedia application developers the ability to marshal virtually infinite resources with an option to pay-per-use and as needed, instead of requiring upfront investments in resources that may never be optimally used. Once multimedia applications are hosted on cloud infrastructures, users are able to access them from anywhere at any time, using devices ranging from smartphones to desktop computers. While Cloud computing optimises the use of resources, it does not (yet) provide an effective solution hosting multimedia content-driven applications which has to process tsunami (often in real-time) of content from heterogeneous sources such as surveillance camera, medical imaging devices, etc.
Developing a software tools and technologies that can support end-to-end lifecycle operations of different multimedia content-driven applications on Cloud infrastructures (while ensuring the QoS targets) remains a challenging research problem. This challenge mainly arises from the uncertainty posed by application workloads (streaming vs. static content), resources capacity demands (e.g., bandwidth, memory, storage, and processors), failures (e.g., failure of a network link), access patterns (e.g., number of end-users and location), different device types (e.g., mobile phone, laptop, and smart TV), indexing needs (e.g., text and content based), and different network types (e.g. wired and wireless).
Topics
Novel software tools, techniques, and technologies for delivering smart media-optimized applications in the CLOUD, but not limited to:
- Cloud-based petabyte multimedia content storage tools and indexing algorithms
- Techniques for petabyte efficient non-SQL indexing of multimedia content
- Statistical multimedia application workload estimation and related cloud service optimization
- Network QoS aware provisioning of multimedia applications
- Techniques for provisioning multimedia applications in collaborative environments
- Autonomic techniques for provisioning cloud services to multimedia applications
- Techniques for content personalization and adaptation
- Innovative application case study from healthcare, aged care, surveillance, and education domains
Important Dates
November 1, 2013 Paper submission deadline
February 1, 2014 First notificationMarch 1, 2014 Revision submission
April 1, 2014 Second notificationMay 1, 2014 Final version submission
Selection and Evaluation Criteria
- Significance to the readership of the journal
- Relevance to the special issue
- Originality of idea, technical contribution, and significance of the presented results
- Quality, clarity, and readability of the written text
- Quality of references and related work
- Quality of research hypothesis, assertions, and conclusion
Guest Editors
Dr. Rajiv Ranjan ? Corresponding Guest Editor
Research Scientist and Project Leader, Information Engineering Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601
Email: raj.ranjan@csiro.au
Prof. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Research Director, Information Engineering Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601
Email:
dimitrios.georgakopoulos@
Prof. Lizhe Wang
Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences
No.9 Dengzhuang South Road, Hadian District
Beijing 100094, P.R. China