United States

Video conferencing has been around since the 1990s, first based on ISDN for digital phonesystems, then H.323, and then SIP for the Internet. The underlying assumption was that phone calls and group communications would all rely on the same standards, creating a universal and seamless user experience. But even as COVID-19 made Zoom a generic term, these standards-based solutions never got much traction. Even for the popular applications, WebRTC seems to have made modest inroads. In this talk, I&#39;ll try to reflect on the reasons for this development, and why we other standards-based internet applications such as web browsers and email have been more successful. Video conferencing also shares this &quot;fate&quot; with text-based chat, where standards-based solutions are competing with WhatsApp, Slack and other proprietary platforms. I believe that transition from (room) hardware to downloadable software, control protocol complexity, industry structure and communication patterns are at least partial explanations for this development. Finally, I will speculate on how video interaction might evolve in the next few years.

SIGMAP 2021

Why is Zoom So Much More Popular than Standards-based Videoconferencing?

## Dr. Nishikant (Nish) Sonwalkar: Academician, Scientist, Musician

![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/0f9b63a0b3deba4a355d98e2c87af68a.png)

Dr. Sonwalkar is regarded as a leading expert in the application of computers in education. He has extensive research and development experience in hypermedia authoring, mobile learning, adaptive learning, and brain-based synaptic learning, advanced scientific visualization, database management systems, and computer simulation.

After receiving doctoral degree from MIT in the area of Molecular Dynamics of Nano-interfaces, he joined MIT as faculty in Mechanical Engineering, but his passion for technology enabled education led him become the founding director of Hypermedia Teaching Facility (Hypermedia Lab) at MIT and later he was appointed as the Principal Educational Architect of MIT.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dgGdFmr9kgs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

NISH 2021

Video conferencing has been around since the 1990s, first based on ISDN for digital phonesystems, then H.323, and then SIP for the Internet. The underlying assumption was that phone calls and group communications would all rely on the same standards, creating a universal and seamless user experience. But even as COVID-19 made Zoom a generic term, these standards-based solutions never got much traction. Even for the popular applications, WebRTC seems to have made modest inroads. In this talk, I'll try to reflect on the reasons for this development, and why we other standards-based internet applications such as web browsers and email have been more successful. Video conferencing also shares this "fate" with text-based chat, where standards-based solutions are competing with WhatsApp, Slack and other proprietary platforms. I believe that transition from (room) hardware to downloadable software, control protocol complexity, industry structure and communication patterns are at least partial explanations for this development. Finally, I will speculate on how video interaction might evolve in the next few years.

keynote

The purpose of SIGMAP 2021, the International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications, is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information systems and applications, including theory and practice in various heterogeneous and interrelated fields including image, video and audio data processing, new sources of multimodal data (text, social, health, etc.) and Multimedia Applications related to representation, storage, authentication and communication of multimedia information. Multimedia is a research field that includes computing methods in which different modalities are integrated and combined, with the aim to take advantage from each data source.<br><br>
CONFERENCE AREAS<br>
1 . Multimedia Networking and Communication<br>
2 . Multimedia Signal Processing<br>
3 . Multimedia Systems and Applications<br>
4 . Multimedia and Deep Learning<br>
5 . Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval<br>
6 . Social Multimedia



The purpose of SIGMAP 2021, the International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications, is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information systems and applications, including theory and practice in various heterogeneous and interrelated fields including image, video and audio data processing, new sources of multimodal data (text, social, health, etc.) and Multimedia Applications related to representation, storage, authentication and communication of multimedia information. 

What makes an image or a video more or less informative? Is there a way to generate an informative image or video? Unlike information theory which is based on the statistical properties of a data item, informativeness is a utilitarian concept. that deeply depends on the contextual information associated with visual objects. This presentation will explore the concept of informativeness for multimedia by adapting an idea from natural language processing. It will make the case that studying information substitutability may give us a clue of evaluating the relative informativeness of multimedia objects, and hence may provide an insight into the generation of synthetic multimedia items.

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Why is Zoom So Much More Popular than Standards-based Videoconferencing?

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