Associate Professor Zhao Shengdong was invited as an opening keynote speaker in the 16th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia(MUM 2017) at Stuttgart, Germany last November 27, 2017. His topic was “The New Interaction Paradigm”.

We live in an interesting time. Although we don’t know exactly what the future will be like, transformational change is a certainty. There are several noticeable trends: one is the change of the computing paradigm from reactive to pro-active. All major companies are working on this paradigm shift, investing heavily in AI and machine learning. This will redefine the role and responsibility of our personal devices and dramatically change our lifestyles over the next few years. Another interesting trend is the interaction shift from device-centric to human-and-environment-centric, which has the potential to allow humans to return to a more natural way of living. Inside this movement, a central enabling piece is AR technology, but this is not without significant challenges. It will be exciting to work on the problems to accelerate this paradigm transformation, to which I hope the MUM community can make a significant contribution.

The International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) is a leading annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The conference brings together experts from both academia and industry for a fruitful exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges, in a comfortable and effective single-track conference format.