Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on Connected Multimedia

Social media has received extensive attention recently and has become a very popular research area due to its wide spectrum of applications. We note that even though the whole area of social media is very popular in the literature, there are a group of research issues that are related to the social-cultural constraints in the social media study that have not yet received sufficient attention. In this context, we group all these issues together under the umbrella of a new sub-area of social media that we call connected multimedia. Consequently, by connected multimedia, we mean the study of the social and technical interactions among users, multimedia data, and devices across cultures and the explicit exploitation of cultural differences. Hence, connected multimedia involves the three elements – the users, the multimedia data, and the devices – with two perspectives – the social focus and the cultural focus. In short, connected multimedia is about multimedia content and connection across community and cultural boundaries. In comparison with those existing research areas including social media as its super-area and human centered computing, we here emphasize that connected multimedia pays more attention to the cultural difference. The definition of the social side is broader than just national cultures; it possibly includes cultures of groups, disciplines, organizations, communities, ethnicities, religions, and nations. This emphasis distinguishes connected multimedia from all other existing areas such as social media and cross-media, which may either claim to include some of these aspects, among many others, or have different foci. This special section is organized following the successful first two editions of the workshop on the newly emerged theme of connected multimedia held in Hangzhou, China, in October of 2009 and in Florence, Italy, in October, 2010. After two rounds of rigorous reviews for all the submissions in response to the CFP of this special section, we have finally selected three papers to be included in this special section on connected multimedia. The paper “Association of Moving Objects across Visual Sensor Networks” by M.J. Mirza and N. Anjum pres