In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing use of sophisticated graphics in designing and manufacturing complex architectural and engineering systems; in modeling, simulating and visualizing complicated physical processes; in generating, highly realistic images and animation; and, in most man-machine interfaces. These trends are made possible by the improvement in performance and the lowering of cost of hardware since the mid 1970s, and the continuing advances in many areas of computer graphics. The major advances in computer graphics include: greater sophistication and realism of image generation techniques, improved man-machine interaction techniques, superior geometric modeling techniques for the representation and modeling of complex physical and mathematical objects, sophisticated software systems for animation and modeling of incorporating latest AI and software engineering techniques, greater integration of CAD and CAM in CIM, and techniques to represent and visualize complicated physical processes. These advances are reflected in this present volume either as papers dealing with one particular aspect of research, or as multifaceted studies involving several different areas.
Dr. Chua is the KITHCT Chair Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. He was the Acting and Founding Dean of the School during 1998 2000. Dr. Chua s main research interest is in multimedia information retrieval and social media analysis. In particular, his research focuses on the extraction, retrieval and question-answering (QA) of text, video, and live media arising from the Web and social networks. He is the director of a multi-million-dollar joint center (named NExT) between NUS and Tsinghua University in China to develop technologies for live media search. The project will gather, mine, search, and organize user-generated content within the cities of Beijing and Singapore. His group participates regularly in TREC-QA and TRECVID video retrieval evaluations.
Dr. Chua is active in the international research community. He has organized and served as program committee member of numerous international conferences in the areas of computer graphics, multimedia, and text processing. He is the conference co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2005, ACM CIVR 2005, and ACM SIGIR 2008. He serves on the editorial boards of: ACM Transactions of Information Systems (ACM), Foundation and Trends in Information Retrieval (NOW), The Visual Computer (Springer Verlag), and Multimedia Tools and Applications (Kluwer). He is a member of the steering committee of ICMR (International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval) and Multimedia Modeling conference series and a member of the international review panel of two large-scale research projects in Europe.
Dr. Chua serves as the Chairman of the Board of Examiners for the Certified IT Project Management ( CITPM ) in Singapore. He is the independent Director of two publicly listed companies in Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, UK.
