Introduction to the special issue on multimedia intelligent services and technologies

The rapid development of digital media technologies enables the emergence of novel media content types for eCommerce, eEducation, and digital entertainment. On the other hand, the advances in communication and microelectronics have led to a transition from traditional personal computer-centric to more intuitive human-centric information access modes and the embedment of computer systems throughout the natural environment. This type of computation is generally known as Pervasive or Ubiquitous Computing. It can also be referred to as ambient intelligence, or talking about media environments as ambient media. It allows a person to use a variety of devices and sensor networks seamlessly embedded throughout our daily life, such as personal digital assistant (PDA), smart electronics, sensors, as well as personal computer, to access those media contents. The combination of these two trends (emergence of media and pervasive computing) holds the potential of providing a user with seamless and ubiquitous access to rich and dynamic multimedia resources from anywhere and anytime. With the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive computation, distributed devices embedded in the natural human environment are getting more and more intelligent. This enables more advanced multimedia services far beyond simple video streaming and communication services. These services are currently on the brink of emergence, and include, e.g., personalized media environments, smart homes, semantic locative media, and context aware computer systems. There are several new technical challenges for effective and appropriate content delivery to pervasive user-terminals. First, different users may have different needs. Nowadays, multimedia content is absolutely overabundant, while the portion of which a user really desired is rather small. Smart personalization techniques, where content is aggregated, either delivered in push and/or pull schemes are required. Second, pervasive end devices usually have various capabilities (e.g., screen size, color depth, video/audio codec, memory, CPU speed, and electrical power), and network connection and transmission bandwidth might be changing dynamically. Therefore, intelligent multimedia services are expected for efficient storage, search, filtering, adaptation, and presentation of media content, to deliver a ubiquitous and personalized media experience to end users. Multimedia intelligent services and technologies have attracted increasing interest in both industry and academia over the last decade. Submissions to this special issue come from an open call for papers as well as from selected papers presented at the 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC-09) held at Brisbane, Australia, July 7–9, 2009. A large number of reviewers assisted us in the review process. In order to ensure high reviewing Z. Yu (&) School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China e-mail: zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cn