Report from ACM Multimedia 2017 – by Benoit Huet

 

Best #SIGMM Social Media Reporter Award! Me? Really??

This was my reaction after being informed by the SIGMM Social Media Editors that I was one of the two recipients following ACM Multimedia 2017! #ACMMM What a wonderful idea this is to encourage our community to communicate, both internally and to other related communities, about our events, our key research results and all the wonderful things the multimedia community stands for!  I have always been surprised by how limited social media engagement is within the multimedia community. Your initiative has all my support! Let’s disseminate our research interest and activities on social media! @SIGMM #Motivated

The SIGMM flagship conference took place on October 23-27 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California, USA. For its 25th edition, the organizing committee had prepared an attractive program cleverly mixing expected classics (i.e. Best Paper session, Grand Challenges, Open Source software competition, etc…) and brand new sessions (such as Fast Forward and Thematic Workshops, Business Idea Venture, and the Novel Topics Track). In this last edition, the conference adopted a single paper length, removing the boundary between long and short papers. The TPC Co-Chairs and Area Chairs had the responsibility of directing accepted papers to either an oral session or a thematic workshop.

Thematic workshops took the form of poster presentations. Presenters were asked to provide a short video briefly motivating their work with the intention of making them available online for reference after the conference (possibly with a link to the full paper and the poster!). However, this did not come through as publication permissions were not cleared out in time, but the idea is interesting and should be taken into account for future editions. Fast forward (or Thematic workshop pitches) are short targeted presentations aimed at attracting the audience to the Thematic Workshop where the papers are presented (in the form of posters in this case). While such short presentations allow conference attendees to efficiently identify which poster are relevant to them, it is crucial for presenters to be well prepared and concentrate on highlighting one key research idea, as time is very limited. It also gives more exposure to poster. I would be in favor of keeping such sessions for future ACM Multimedia editions.

The 25th edition of ACM MM wasn’t short of keynotes. No less than 6 industry keynotes had punctuated each of the conference half day. The first keynote by Achin Bhowmik from Starkey focused on Audio as a mean to “Enhancing and Augmenting Human Perception with Artificial Intelligence”. Bill Dally from NVidia presented “Efficient Methods and Hardware for Deep Learning”, in short why we all need GPUs! “Building Multi-Modal Interfaces for Smartphones” was the topic presented by Injong Rhee (Samsung Electronics), Scott Silver (YouTube) discussed the difficulties in “Bringing a Billion Hours to Life” (referring to the vast quantities of videos uploaded and viewed on the sharing platform, and the long tail). Ed. Chang from HTC presented “DeepQ: Advancing Healthcare Through AI and VR” and demonstrated how healthcare is and will benefit from AR, VR and AI. Danny Lange from Unity Technologies highlighted how important machine learning and deep learning are in the game industry in ”Bringing Gaming, VR, and AR to Life with Deep Learning”.  Personally, I would have preferred a mix of industry/academic keynotes as I found some of the keynotes not targeting an audience of computer scientists.

Arnold W. M. Smeulders received the SIGMM Technical Achievement Award for his outstanding and pioneering contribution defining and bridging the semantic gap in content based image retrieval (his lecture is here: https://youtu.be/n8kLxKNjQ0A). His talk was sharp, enlightening and very well received by the audience.

The @sigmm rising star award went to Dr Liangliang Cao for his contribution to large-scale multimedia recognition and social media mining.

The conference was noticeably flavored with trendy topics such as AI, Human augmenting technologies, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Machine (Deep) Learning, as can be noticed from the various works rewarded.

The Best Paper award was given to Bokun Wang, Yang Yang, Xing Xu, Alan Hanjalic, Heng Tao Shen for their work on “Adversarial Cross-Modal Retrieval“.

Yuan Tian, Suraj Raghuraman, Thiru Annaswamy, Aleksander Borresen, Klara Nahrstedt, Balakrishnan Prabhakaran received the Best Student Paper award for the paper “H-TIME: Haptic-enabled Tele-Immersive Musculoskeletal Examination“.

The Best demo award went to “NexGenTV: Providing Real-Time Insight during Political Debates in a Second Screen Application” by Olfa Ben Ahmed, Gabriel Sargent, Florian Garnier, Benoit Huet, Vincent Claveau, Laurence Couturier, Raphaël Troncy, Guillaume Gravier, Philémon Bouzy and Fabrice Leménorel.

The Best Open source software award was received by Hao Dong, Akara Supratak, Luo Mai, Fangde Liu, Axel Oehmichen, Simiao Yu, Yike Guo for “TensorLayer: A Versatile Library for Efficient Deep Learning Development“.

The Best Grand Challenge Video Captioning Paper award went to “Knowing Yourself: Improving Video Caption via In-depth Recap“, by Qin Jin, Shizhe Chen, Jia Chen, Alexander Hauptmann.

The Best Grand Challenge Social Media Prediction Paper award went to Chih-Chung Hsu, Ying-Chin Lee, Ping-En Lu, Shian-Shin Lu, Hsiao-Ting Lai, Chihg-Chu Huang,Chun Wang, Yang-Jiun Lin, Weng-Tai Su for “Social Media Prediction Based on Residual Learning and Random Forest“.

Finally, the Best Brave New Idea Paper award was conferred to John R Smith, Dhiraj Joshi, Benoit Huet, Winston Hsu and Zef Cota for the paper “Harnessing A.I. for Augmenting Creativity: Application to Movie Trailer Creation“.

A few years back, the multimedia community was concerned with the lack of truly multimedia publications. In my opinion, those days are behind us. The technical program has evolved into a richer and broader one, let’s keep the momentum!

The location was a wonderful opportunity for many of the attendees to take a stroll down memory lane and see computers and devices (VT100, PC, etc…) from the past thanks to the complementary entrance to the museum exhibitions. The “isolated” location of the conference venue meant going out for lunch breaks was out of the question given the duration of the lunch break. As a solution, the organizers catered buffet lunches. This resulted in the majority of the attendees interacting and mixing over the lunch break while eating. This could be an effective way to better integrate new participants and strengthen the community.  Both the welcome reception and the banquet were held successfully within Computer Museum. Both events offer yet another opportunity for new connections to be made and for further interaction between attendees. Indeed, the atmosphere of both occasions was relaxed, lively and joyful. 

All in all, ACM MM 2017 was another successful edition of our flagship conference, many thanks to the entire organizing team and see you all in Seoul for ACM MM 2018 http://www.acmmm.org/2018/ and follow @sigmm on Twitter!