A decade ago we saw the birth of Flickr, a media website for social photo sharing. Since then, social media websites have grown to encompass many types of photo, video, audio, and even hyper-link sharing. Many researchers have conducted work on these social-websites in general yet there still exists many opportunities to explore how people engage with media online, specifically multimedia, in social contexts. However, the practice of photography itself is almost two centuries old. What can we further understand about the modern practice of photography (selfies, food, and all) from the works and writings of the masters (both past and contemporary)? In this talk, I will highlight some new challenges for researchers studying social photography and present a few recent findings from an investigation of Flickr which include geographic annotation of photographs and regions, community congregation online, and social engagement.
David Ayman Shamma is the former Director of the HCI Research Group at Yahoo Labs and Flickr. He received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2005 in Computer Science from the Intelligent Information Laboratory. His personal research investigates social multimedia computing and creativity. He currently serves on the steering committees for ACM Multimedia and ACM TVX. In 2013, he was co-chair of the Technical Program at ACM Multimedia and he is a co-general chair for ACM Creativity and Cognition 2017. In the past, he was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Keiko-NUS CUTE Center at the National University of Singapore (2014), he was appointed as a Senior Member of the ACM (2012). Before Yahoo!, he was an instructor at the Medill School of Journalism; he has also taught courses in Computer Science and Studio Art. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he was a visiting research scientist for the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA Ames Research Center.