Ramesh C Jain

Digital Library

ACM Distinguished Service Award

USA - 2022

citation

For establishing SIGMultiMedia, and for outstanding leadership and persistent service to ACM and the computing community for the past four decades

Professor Ramesh Jain is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of computer vision and multimedia and has made exceptional contributions to the advancement of these areas. His service has played a crucial role in the community. His visionary and innovative ideas have been instrumental in introducing many algorithms, protocols, and analytics approaches that were featured at SIGMM conferences before they gained wide recognition and popularity.

Thanks to Prof. Jain's tireless efforts and expertise, SIGMM has emerged as a prominent special interest group within the ACM. Over the past three decades, he has contributed to its success through his leadership and dedicated service. He played a pivotal role in organizing the first NSF workshop on visual information management systems, was a key member of the organizing committee for the first ACM Multimedia conference and delivered a tutorial at that conference held in conjunction with ACM SIGGraph in Anaheim. These activities paved the way for the establishment of ACM SIGMM.

Prof. Jain's track record includes serving as the Chairman of ACM SIG MultiMedia, founding and serving as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE MultiMedia magazine and the Machine Vision and Applications journal, and founding and directing research laboratories at three universities. He has also organized several professional workshops and conferences.

Prof. Jain is known for consistently providing visionary guidance to the community. In the early 2000s, he expanded the definition of multimedia to encompass Folk Computing and Experiential Computing. His influential article in CACM on Folk Computing discussed how mobile phones would become Folk Computers in the future. His article in the special Millennium issue of CACM on experiential computing highlighted the importance of events and experiences in computing and how smartphones are increasingly being used for communication of experiences using photos, emojis, and other visual mechanisms. In recent years, Professor Jain has been sharing his vision for revolutionizing healthcare by utilizing multimodal data to provide personalized and preventive care that focuses on adjusting lifestyle and environment and administering medicine only when necessary to achieve desired health goals and improve quality of life.

Prof. Jain's extraordinary contributions have earned him numerous awards and accolades. He has been recognized as a Fellow by several prestigious organizations, including ACM, AAAS, AAAI, IEEE, SPIE, and IAPR. He was also honored with the ACM SIG Multimedia Outstanding Achievements Award, a prestigious recognition of his outstanding contributions and service to the field.

ACM Fellows

USA - 2003

citation

For contributions to computer vision and multimedia information systems.

2022 ACM Distinguished Service Award

Ramesh Jain, Professor, University of California, Irvine, receives the ACM Distinguished Service Award for establishing the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia Systems (SIGMM), and for outstanding leadership and sustained services to ACM and the computing community for the past four decades.

In 1993, Jain organized the first NSF workshop on visual information management systems. He was one of the organizing committee members of the first ACM Multimedia conference and gave a tutorial at that conference, which was held in conjunction with ACM SIGGraph that year. All these activities paved the way for the successful establishment of ACM SIGMM.

Since then, Jain has remained an active contributor to ACM Multimedia Computing. He has been on the organizing committees of almost all the past 25 ACM Multimedia Conferences. Additionally, he organized special issues of Communications of the ACM on visual computing, served as founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia magazine, organized numerous workshops, served on editorial boards of almost all multimedia-related journals, and helped SIGMM in many ways including chairing it from 2003 to 2007.

For his contributions and service, Jain has received numerous awards and has been recognized as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), SPIE (an international society for optics and photonics), and the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR).