Mobile Multimedia: Bringing Users into Focus

Let us borrow this quote from the British humorist and cartoonist Ashleigh Brilliant to summarize the role of mobility in the development of the information society: "Unless you move, the place where you are is the place where you will always be". In more serious terms, new paradigms like pervasive and mobile computing clearly show a trend of using computing and communication power to overcome the physical limitations inherited from desktop computers. Technologies like wireless networks, ambient intelligence, mobile agents, miniaturized computing devices, embedded systems, etc., have enabled a plethora of new types of applications and services. However, usage statistics showed that there is still a huge gap between the potential of such services and their acceptance in practice. In this talk, we will explain and highlight the factors, trends, and issues on how to deploy and utilize mobile multimedia for the design, development and deployment of a content rich, user and business friendly, integrated network of autonomous, mobile agents. One of the major questions to be answered is how to enable the human users to cope with this omnipresence of information. We already observe in the "traditional" Web, how people are suffering from information overflow, receiving too much, the wrong, or even unwanted information. Personalization and adaptivity appear to be potential solutions to this problem but bear the risk of putting the user out of control. Approaches trying to overcome this conflict will be the focus of the presentation.