On behalf of the entire Organizing Committee, we wish to report to you that the seventeen ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia 2009), was held October 19-22, 2009 at the Beijing Hotel in Beijing, China.

The General Chairs at the Conference Banquet (l.t.r. Alan Hanjalic, Yong Rui, Wen Gao)

ACM Multimedia is the premier annual event on multimedia research, technology and art. Since 1993, the conference has brought together researchers, practitioners and users from academia, industry, and government active in the broad field of multimedia in order to communicate the state-of-the-art in multimedia research, technology and art. In particular, the conference brings newest insights into the possibilities to explore and exploit old and new media (e.g., text, audio, visual, haptics), used in isolation or in a synergetic combination, in order to bring the technology facilitating the interaction and communication among humans, machines and data a significant step further.

SIG Multimedia Chair Klara Nahrstedt

Richness of new fundamental concepts, practical tools and controversial ideas that emerged from the worldwide multimedia community in the past year is reflected in a wide variety of elements of this year’s conference program. In addition to the oral and poster sessions presenting the full and short technical papers, respectively, the conference also features a plenary brave new topic session and two panel discussions bringing up the issues that are currently hot and controversial in the field of multimedia. Special role in the conference program has been reserved for the workshops held in conjunction with the main conference and meant to focus on specific multimedia-related topics, either to explore them more in depth or to promote them in the multimedia community. 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 includes technical demonstrations of research prototypes and systems, open source software competition, video demonstration of concepts and applications, as well as multimedia art sessions. Finally, by including the doctoral symposium and tutorials on various topics, the conference is also committed to inspire and educate junior scientists in the field and so strengthen and expand the multimedia research community for the years to come.

Recipient of the 2009 SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, Lawrence A. Rowe

A highlight of ACM Multimedia 2009 was the Multimedia Grand Challenge, organized for the first time as a part of the conference program. The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from a number of industry leaders geared to engage the multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 2-5 year horizon for multimedia. Researchers were encouraged to submit working systems in response to the challenge to win the Grand Challenge competition. A large number of submissions were received for this first edition of the competition. The large number not only reveals the interest of the research community to address relevant real-life problems, but also reflects the high potential that we already have in the community to successfully address these problems.

Editor-in-Chief of ACM SIGMM’s TOMCCAP journal, Nicholas Georganas

The Content, Applications, Systems, and Human-Centered Multimedia tracks received 305 long paper submissions (138 in Content, 75 in Applications, 56 in Systems, and 36 in Human-Centered Multimedia). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a double-blind review process. The Program Committee met on June 28 2009 in New York 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 50 long papers: 22 in the Content track, 12 in the Applications track, 10 in the Systems track, and 6 in the Human-Centered Multimedia track. This represents an acceptance rate of 16.4% percent.

The short paper program received 369 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 103 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 27.9% percent. These short papers will be presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year’s sixth version of the Interactive Art Program will consist of long and short papers in the dedicated multimedia art sessions.

Welcome to the Animation School of Beijing Film Academy, hosts of the Conference Reception

We would like to thank our supporters: Baidu, Beijing Film Academy, FXPAL, Google, HP Labs, Microsoft Research, National Natural Science Foundation of China, NEC Labs, Netease, Peking University, Star Software, and Tencent. Without their generous support, organizing this conference would have been difficult.

The ACM Multimedia 2009 conference is the result of a strong and dedicated effort by a large number of volunteers. We would like to express our deep gratitude to everyone on the Organizing Committee for making the conference happen, 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 their strategic and administrative support. Finally we would like to acknowledge ACM and thank the special interest group SIGMM for sponsoring this event.

We hope you enjoyed the conference.

Wen Gao, Peking University, China
Yong Rui, Microsoft, China
Alan Hanjalic, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
ACM Multimedia 2009 General Co-Chairs

CIVR is one of the most important and influential conferences in the area of image and video analysis and retrieval and gathers many important researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Following this tradition, CIVR 2009 has been a very successful event. This year 138 submissions from 29 countries were received and, after being reviewed by the Program Committee members, 45 were accepted for presentation (18 orals and 27 posters). Additionally, the program included two excellent invited presentations given by Prof. Luis von Ahn from Carnegie Mellon University, USA, and Prof. Luc van Gool, from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the University of Leuven (Belgium). Read more →

Dear colleagues:

It is our great pleasure to launch the exciting SIGMM Educational Portal in order to promote educational related resource sharing among the multimedia community. We plan to build a comprehensive destination for information such as multimedia-related degree programs, courses, audio/video materials, and textbooks. Read more →

Dear SIGMM Members,

our flagship conference, the ACM Multimedia, has now existed for existed for 17 years. And still, the conference organization is changing every year. With an approach that puts new chairs and entirely new organizing committees in charge every year in a bidding process, ACM Multimedia is highly dynamic. However, this dynamicity comes with major downsides. Every committee makes changes, and because continuity is not guaranteed, good changes do often get lost, while bad ones persist. An institutional memory is missing. Read more →

In this edition of the SIGMM Records, we present some background for the paper “Wireless network security: comparison of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) mechanism, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and RSN (Robust Security Network) security protocols”. Of all papers that were presented at workshops and conferences that were sponsored or co-sponsored by SIG Multimedia, it was the second most downloaded paper in the third quarter of 2008. We have therefore asked the authors to describe the background of their work, their motivation, the problems in performing the research, and possible errata. Read more →