Multimedia Research: What Is the Right Approach?

The multimedia research community has become increasingly proactive in trying to address the problems of people living in a world dominated by big (multimedia) data. Research has moved from user-agnostic problems to user-centric problems, and the quality of the offered solutions largely depends on the selected method, algorithm, and dataset. Here, however, Alan Hanjalic asks whether the community is as proactive when it comes to discussing if the selected approach is the right one? What are the guiding principles used to make this choice? Is there a philosophy underlying these principles? If so, how does it help optimize the mapping between the problems and proposed solutions? And what are the long-term implications of deploying the solutions in society?