Popular research topics in multimedia

Multimedia has taken on a very important role in our daily life which has led to a rapid growth research on this topic. Multimedia research covers a variety of problem domains so one must examine many current popular research areas to obtain a basic understanding of current multimedia research. This allows us to understand what has been done recently and to consider what will be more important in future. In this study, we collect and analyze data from ACM Multimedia conferences from 2007 to 2011. In particular, the organized sessions (or areas) and the citation count of popular areas are examined using the Web of Science and Google Scholar. Then, the self-organizing map method is used as a visualization tool for keyword analysis in order to identify popular areas and research topics in multimedia. In addition, we also examine the consistency of the identified popular research areas and topics between the ACM Multimedia conferences and two recent journal special issues.