ACM International Conference on Multimedia

Conference Chairs: Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Son Vuong

Event location: Vancouver, Canada

Event date: October 27 - 31, 2008

Web site: http://www.mcrlab.uottawa.ca/acmmm2008/

Reported by: Abdulmotaleb El Saddik and Son Vuong

The sixteen ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2008), was held October 27- 31, 2008 at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Vancouver, situated on Canada’s east coast, enjoys a milder climate than much of Canada. As hosts to the 2010 winter Olympics, it boasts a plethora of sporting facilities, as well as ample opportunities for outdoor recreation with 3200 acres of parks and 11 miles of beaches.

ACM Multimedia is the premier annual professional meeting for communicating the state-of-the-art in multimedia research, technology, and art. The pervasive use of multimedia has permeated into almost every aspect of our life. This is reflected in a wide variety of programs incorporated into the conference. The conference featured the usual high-quality technical paper presentations, short poster paper presentations, doctoral symposium for senior graduate students, brave-new emerging topics, as well as tutorials and workshops in various areas. One key aspect of this conference that is different from most other academic conferences is its emphasis on systems and applications. To this end, the conference also included technical demonstrations of research prototypes and systems, open software competition, video demonstration of concepts and applications, as well as interactive arts, which  included an exhibition of multimedia art and a visit to the Science World British Columbia in Vancouver.

The overall conference encompassed three major parts: interesting tutorials (135 participants) on Monday, October 27, an exciting three day main conference on Tuesday through Thursday, October 28-30, and a set of workshops in hot multimedia areas on, October 31. This year we also held the first ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval on October 30-31 in conjunction with ACM Multimedia. The Content, Applications, Systems, and Multimedia Interactions tracks received 280 long paper submissions (109 in Content, 84 in Applications, 50 in Systems, and 37 in Multimedia Interactions). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a single-blind review process. The program committee met on June 20, 2008 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 56 long papers: 23 in the Content track, 16 in the Applications track, 9 in the Systems track, and 8 in the Multimedia Interactions track. This represents an acceptance rate of 20 percent.

The short paper program received 236 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 80 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 33 percent. These short papers were presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year’s fifth version of the Interactive Arts Program also consisted of long and short papers as well as an art exhibition.

Three are couple of extra news we want to share with you. First and for the first time, ACM MM conference had more than 500 participants. Second, the first SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, was granted during the Banquet of the 2008 edition of ACM MM conference. Third the organizing committee was able to secure a special issue for the four nominated papers for the Best Paper Award. The special issue will be published by ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications. And most important, no one complained about location or food.

We would like to thank our supporters: FXPAL, Google, IBM, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, Ricoh California Research Center, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Nokia Products Ltd and LG Electronics Mobile Research, Telefonica, the Hessischen Telemedia Technologie Kompetenz- Center (HTTC), the TU Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Laboratory (KOM), the University of Ottawa, and the University of British Columbia. Their generous support made several key aspects of the conference possible, including the various prizes, student travel, and the Interactive Arts Program. Organizing this event would be difficult without their generous support.

ACM MM 2008 conference is the result of dedicated effort by a large number of volunteers. We would like to express our deep gratitude to everyone on the conference committee and their teams for their devoted work and attention to details in preparing for the conference, and to the program committee and external reviewers who diligently worked to review submissions and provide suggestions and feedback to authors that resulted in a high quality final program. We also thank the ACM Staff for being always available to organize and think through the many little thinks that came up during the planning of this conference and “YOU” the authors for submitting your papers and your continued interest. Finally we would like to acknowledge ACM and thank the special interest group SIGMM for sponsoring this event.

We hope you enjoyed the event and look forward to meeting you in Bejing.
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa

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