ACM Honors Ramesh Jain with Distinguished Service Award
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today recognized four individuals with awards for their exemplary service to the computing field. Working in diverse areas, the 2022 award recipients were selected by their peers for initiatives that have expanded ACM’s mission of “Advancing Computing as a Science and Profession.” More importantly, in a field where individual efforts yield monetary rewards, this year’s ACM awardees are largely being recognized for selfless volunteer contributions. The four recipients helped the field with efforts such as authoring an influential textbook on computer programming, founding an organization within ACM dedicated to multimedia, taking a leading role in ACM’s publications program, and bringing an innovative computer science education program to an underserved region of Africa.
One of the recipients is Professor Ramesh Jain, who received the ACM Distinguished Service Award for establishing SIGMultiMedia, and for outstanding leadership and persistent service to ACM and the computing community for the past four decades.
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.