Tan Sri Zam shared his insight at MMU's Executive Talk

On 4 August 2016, YBhg. Tan Sri Dato' Sri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, the Managing Director and Group Chief Executive Officer of Telekom Malaysia shared his insight in the Executive Talk GCEO on the topic of 'Strategic Communication' at Multimedia University (MMU). The talk was attended by more than 50 students of Foundation In English (FIE), Bachelor of Strategic Communication (B.Comm) as well as Faculty of Management (FOM). Also present, Prof. Ahmad Ra Mohamed Eshaq, the President of MMU and Associate Professor Dr. Madhubala Bava Harji, the Dean of Learning Institute for Empowerment (LiFE). In the two hours eye-opening speech, he shared the broad spectrum of strategic communications particularly in the global, national and TM's point of view. The audience learnt how TM manage to face the challenges of executing the vision to be the Convergence Champion and Go Digital programme which in line with Life Made Easier slogan through the effective internal and external communications

MMU Shares Expertise In Setting Up the UniSZA Digital Hub

Our university was invited to share its expertise with Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA) in a collaboration to set up the UniSZa Digital Hub, which was launched on 8th March 2017 at Besut, Terengganu. The ceremony was graced by Dato’ Seri Idris Jusoh, the Minister of Higher Education and attended by Prof. Datuk Dr. Ahmad Rafi Mohamed Eshaq, the President of MMU and Prof. Dato' Dr. Ahmad Zubaidi Abdul Latif, the Vice Chancellor of UniSZa. At the ceremony, the minister applauded the collaboration which will focusing on the digital technology domain to create and catalyse opportunities for Research and Innovation of higher learning sector in Malaysia

Firming Research Culture and Practices in Science & Technology

Over 100 researchers and academic members from all faculties in MMU participated in a one-day workshop on journal writing & publication for science and technology on 15 March 2017 at Cyberjaya campus and on 16 March 2017 at Melaka campus. It was co-organised by MMU Library and Research Management Centre (RMC) with the support of IEEE ComSoc/VTS Malaysia, IEEE Young Professional Malaysia & United Technology Sdn. Bhd. (IEEE Representative in Malaysia). The workshop was graced by the then Vice President (R&D), Prof. Dr. Heng Swee Huay at Melaka and the Chief Librarian, Kamal Sujak in Cyberjaya. Edward Kennedy from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tan Ai Hui from FOE, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. You Ah Heng from FET as the featured speakers, inspired the participants to prepare manuscripts and get them published in journals or conferences. They also shared a lot of useful tips and hints during the workshop. With the strong partnership between MMU Library, departments & societies, the organiser expected to have more authorship workshops will be organised to catalyse research culture among the innovative MMU community. The targeted increase in the utilisation of library resources is essential to boost MMU, going forward “to be a Top 100 University in Asia with Global Recognition by 2020”

Stars in their eyes: What eye-tracking reveal about multimedia perceptual quality

Perceptual multimedia quality is of paramount importance to the continued take-up and proliferation of multimedia applications: users will not use and pay for applications if they are perceived to be of low quality. Whilst traditionally distributed multimedia quality has been characterised by Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, these neglect the user perspective of the issue of quality. In order to redress this shortcoming, we characterise the user multimedia perspective using the Quality of Perception (QoP) metric, which encompasses not only a user’s satisfaction with the quality of a multimedia presentation, but also his/her ability to analyse, synthesise and assimilate informational content of multimedia. In recognition of the fact that monitoring eye movements offers insights into visual perception, as well as the associated attention mechanisms and cognitive processes, this paper reports on the results of a study investigating the impact of differing multimedia presentation frame rates on user QoP and eye path data. Our results show that provision of higher frame rates, usually assumed to provide better multimedia presentation quality, do not significantly impact upon the median coordinate value of eye path data. Moreover, higher frame rates do not significantly increase level of participant information assimilation, although they do significantly improve overall user enjoyment and quality perception of the multimedia content being shown

Multimedia Chinese Web Search Engines: A Survey

The objective of this paper is to explore the state of multimedia search functionality on major general and dedicated Web search engines in Chinese language. The authors studied: a) how many Chinese Web search engines presently make use of multimedia searching, and b) the type of multimedia search functionality available. Specifically, the following were examined: a) multimedia features - features allowing multimedia search; and b) extent of personalization - the extent to which a search engine Web site allows users to control multimedia search. Overall, Chinese Web search engines offer limited multimedia searching functionality. The significance of the study is based on two factors: a) little research has been conducted on Chinese Web search engines, and b) the instrument used in the study and the results obtained by this research could help users, Web designers, and Web search engine developers. By large, general Web search engines support more multimedia features than specialized one

A cognitive approach to user perception of multimedia quality: An empirical investigation

Whilst multimedia technology has been one of the main contributing factors behind the Web's success, delivery of personalized multimedia content has been a desire seldom achieved in practice. Moreover, the perspective adopted is rarely viewed from a cognitive styles standpoint, notwithstanding the fact that they have significant effects on users’ preferences with respect to the presentation of multimedia content. Indeed, research has thus far neglected to examine the effect of cognitive styles on users’ subjective perceptions of multimedia quality. This paper aims to examine the relationships between users’ cognitive styles, the multimedia quality of service delivered by the underlying network, and users’ quality of perception (understood as both enjoyment and informational assimilation) associated with the viewed multimedia content. Results from the empirical study reported here show that all users, regardless of cognitive style, have higher levels of understanding of informational content in multimedia video clips (represented in our study by excerpts from television programmes) with weak dynamism, but that they enjoy moderately dynamic clips most. Additionally, multimedia content was found to significantly influence users’ levels of understanding and enjoyment. Surprisingly, our study highlighted the fact that Bimodal users prefer to draw on visual sources for informational purposes, and that the presence of text in multimedia clips has a detrimental effect on the knowledge acquisition of all three cognitive style groups

Operating-system support for distributed multimedia

Multimedia applications place new demands upon processors, networks and operating systems. While some network designers, through ATM for example, have considered revolutionary approaches to supporting multimedia, the same cannot be said for operating systems designers. Most work is evolutionary in nature, attempting to identify additional features that can be added to existing systems to support multimedia. Here we describe the Pegasus project's attempt to build an integrated hardware and operating system environment from\ud the ground up specifically targeted towards multimedia

Using multimedia to enhance the accessibility of the learning environment for disabled students: reflections from the Skills for Access project

As educators' awareness of their responsibilities towards ensuring the accessibility of the learning environment to disabled students increases, significant debate surrounds the implications of accessibility requirements on educational multimedia. There would appear to be widespread concern that the fundamental principles of creating accessible web‐based materials seem at odds with the creative and innovative use of multimedia to support learning and teaching, as well as concerns over the time and cost of providing accessibility features that can hold back resource development and application. Yet, effective use of multimedia offers a way of enhancing the accessibility of the learning environment for many groups of disabled students. Using the development of ‘Skills for Access’, a web resource supporting the dual aims of creating optimally accessible multimedia for learning, as an example, the attitudinal, practical and technical challenges facing the effective use of multimedia as an accessibility aid in a learning environment will be explored. Reasons why a holistic approach to accessibility may be the most effective in ensuring that multimedia reaches its full potential in enabling and supporting students in learning, regardless of any disability they may have, will be outlined and discussed

Measuring concept similarities in multimedia ontologies: analysis and evaluations

The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing