Challenges and Opportunities in Building Socially Intelligent Machines [Social Sciences]

A t the recent ACM Multimedia conference in Florence, Ramesh Jain boldly and succinctly stated, "Content without context is meaningless." He presented a paper on the topic at the conference's Brave New Ideas session and challenged multimedia researchers to "stop ignoring the elephant in the room" (context) and to recognize that by reducing problems to being entirely content focused, they are doing both their research and their community a disservice [1]. Further, he writes that many intractable problems in multimedia analysis have been substan tially aided by taking context into account, such as object recognition, image search, and photo management.