The field of multimedia is constantly evolving and innovating. To continue in our tradition of representing the wide spectrum of multimedia innovations, we are offering several new special issues for 2007 and 2008, and adding two board members.

For our October-December 2007 issue, we're featuring articles on multimedia signal processing and systems in healthcare and life sciences. This special issue will showcase areas where multimedia has had the most impact, with a focus on multimodal systems in behavior analysis in neuroscience, multimedia data analysis for high-throughput biology, mining multimedia data in healthcare, signal processing in clinical decision support systems, and genomic signal processing. In the April-June 2008 issue, we'll present a selection of advances in the area of collaborative tagging of multimedia, including collaborative multimedia tagging systems, linking social and content networks, and hybrid collaborative- and machine-learning techniques for tagging.

Another special issue we are considering for 2008 is on assistive devices and technologies. There are a number of technological challenges and research opportunities for multimedia in improving the lives of people on a daily basis.

Of course, we're always interested in acquiring and publishing quality articles from a wide array of multimedia disciplines, so I encourage you to submit your manuscript for consideration. We have a fairly simple and efficient online manuscript submission process (visit http://www.computer.org/multimedia for more details).

Part of keeping our magazine's content lively and diverse includes adding new talent to the editorial board. We have therefore added two new members—Yong Rui and Utz Westermann—who I believe will be excellent assets to our magazine. I look forward to Yong's and Utz's fresh perspectives, just as I always look forward to hearing our readers' perspectives. If you have any comments or ideas for the magazine, feel free to email them to me at panch@asu.edu.

Yong Rui serves as the director of strategy of the Microsoft China Research and Development Group. Before this role, he spent seven years managing the Multimedia Collaboration team at Microsoft Research Redmond. He contributes significantly to various research communities in the areas of computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning. His contribution to relevance feedback in image search created a new research area in multimedia. Rui received a BS from Southeast University, an MS from Tsinghua University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He's a senior member of both ACM and IEEE. He's also an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technologies. He also holds an Executive Training Certificate from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Gerd Utz Westermann is the head of event-based multimedia systems management at Seraja Technologies in Bangalore, India. He's a leading engineer and researcher in multimedia content management and mobile information systems, with a particular focus on event-based multimodal information management and analysis. He's responsible for the design and implementation of the event-centric multimedia content indexing back end behind Seraja EventWeb and the mobile application developments of Seraja Technologies. He received a PhD from the Technical University of Vienna (with distinction) and has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, in Ramesh Jain's NGS Group.