MMM 2017 — 23rd International Conference on MultiMedia Modeling

MMM is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners for sharing new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. The 23rd edition of MMM took place on January 4-6 of 2017, on the modern campus of Reykjavik University. In this short report, we outline the major aspects of the conference, including: technical program; best paper session; video browser showdown; demonstrations; keynotes; special sessions; and social events. We end by acknowledging the contributions of the many excellent colleagues who helped us organize the conference. For more details, please refer to the MMM 2017 web site.

Technical Program

The MMM conference calls for research papers reporting original investigation results and demonstrations in all areas related to multimedia modeling technologies and applications. Special sessions were also held that focused on addressing new challenges for the multimedia community.

This year, 149 regular full paper submissions were received, of which 36 were accepted for oral presentation and 33 for poster presentation, for a 46% acceptance ratio. Overall, MMM received 198 submissions for all tracks, and accepted 107 for oral and poster presentation, for a total of 54% acceptance rate. For more details, please refer to the table below.

Best Paper Session

Four best paper candidates were selected for the best paper session, which was a plenary session at the start of the conference.

The best paper, by unanimous decision, was “On the Exploration of Convolutional Fusion Networks for Visual Recognition” by Yu Liu, Yanming Guo, and Michael S. Lew. In this paper, the authors propose an efficient multi-scale fusion architecture, called convolutional fusion networks (CFN), which can generate the side branches from multi-scale intermediate layers while consuming few parameters.

The best student paper, partially chosen due to the excellent presentation of the work, was “Cross-modal Recipe Retrieval: How to Cook This Dish?” by Jingjing Chen, Lei Pang, and Chong-Wah Ngo. In this work, the problem of sharing food pictures from the viewpoint of cross-modality analysis was explored. Given a large number of image and recipe pairs acquired from the Internet, a joint space is learnt to locally capture the ingredient correspondence from images and recipes.

The two runners-up were “Spatio-temporal VLAD Encoding for Human Action Recognition in Videos” by Ionut Cosmin Duta, Bogdan Ionescu, Kiyoharu Aizawa, and Nicu Sebe, and “A Framework of Privacy-Preserving Image Recognition for Image-Based Information Services” by Kojiro Fujii, Kazuaki Nakamura, Naoko Nitta, and Noboru Babaguchi.

Video Browser Showdown

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual live video search competition, which has been organized as a special session at MMM conferences since 2012. In VBS, researchers evaluate and demonstrate the efficiency of their exploratory video retrieval tools on a shared data set in front of the audience. The participating teams start with a short presentation of their system and then perform several video retrieval tasks with a moderately large video collection (about 600 hours of video content). This year, seven teams registered for VBS, although one team could not compete for personal and technical reasons. For the first time in 2017, live judging was included, in which a panel of expert judges made decisions in real-time about the accuracy of the submissions for ⅓ of the tasks.

On the social side, two changes were also made from previous conferences. First, VBS was held in a plenary session, to avoid conflicts with other schedule items. Second, the conference reception was held at VBS, which meant that attendees had extra incentives to attend VBS, namely food and drink. And third, Alan Smeaton served as “color commentator” during the competition, interviewing the organizers and participants, and helping explain to the audience what was going on. All of these changes worked well, and contributed to a very well attended VBS session.

Demonstrations

Five demonstrations were presented at MMM. As in previous years, the best demonstration was selected using both a popular vote and a selection committee. And, as in previous years, both methods produced the same winner, which was: “DeepStyleCam: A Real-time Style Transfer App on iOS” by Ryosuke Tanno, Shin Matsuo, Wataru Shimoda, and Keiji Yanai.

Keynotes

The first keynote, held in the first session of the conference, was “Multimedia Analytics: From Data to Insight” by Marcel Worring, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He reported on a novel multimedia analytics model based on an extensive survey of over eight hundred papers. In the analytics model, the need for semantic navigation of the collection is emphasized and multimedia analytics tasks are placed on an exploration-search axis. Categorization is then proposed as a suitable umbrella task for realizing the exploration-search axis in the model. In the end, he considered the scalability of the model to collections of 100 million images, moving towards methods which truly support interactive insight gain in huge collections.

The second keynote, held in the last session of the conference, was “Creating Future Values in Information Access Research through NTCIR” by Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Japan. She reported on NTCIR (NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research), which is a series of evaluation workshops designed to enhance the research in information access technologies, such as information retrieval, question answering, and summarization using East-Asian languages, by providing infrastructures for research and evaluation. Prof Kando provided motivations for the participation in such benchmarking activities and she highlighted the range of scientific tasks and challenges that have been explored at NTCIR over the past twenty years. She ended with ideas for the future direction of NTCIR.

Special Sessions

During the conference, four special sessions were held. Special sessions are mini-venues, each focusing on one state-of-the-art research direction within the multimedia field. The sessions are proposed and chaired by international researchers, who also manage the review process, in coordination with the Program Committee Chairs. This year’s sessions were:
– “Social Media Retrieval and Recommendation” organized by Liqiang Nie, Yan Yan, and Benoit Huet;
– “Modeling Multimedia Behaviors” organized by Peng Wang, Frank Hopfgartner, and Liang Bai;
– “Multimedia Computing for Intelligent Life” organized by Zhineng Chen, Wei Zhang, Ting Yao, Kai-Lung Hua, and Wen-Huang Cheng; and
– “Multimedia and Multimodal Interaction for Health and Basic Care Applications” organized by Stefanos Vrochidis, Leo Wanner, Elisabeth André, Klaus Schoeffmann.

Social Events

This year, there were two main social events at MMM 2017: a welcome reception at the Video Browser Showdown, as discussed above, and the conference banquet. Optional tours then allowed participants to further enjoy their stay on the unique and beautiful island.

The conference banquet was held in two parts. First, we visited the exotic Blue Lagoon, which is widely recognised as one of the modern wonders of the world and one of the most popular tourist destinations in Iceland. MMM participants had the option of bathing for two hours in this extraordinary spa, and applying the healing silica mud to their skin, before heading back for the banquet in Reykjavík.

The banquet itself was then held at the Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre in downtown Reykjavík. Harpa is one of Reykjavik‘s most recent, yet greatest and most distinguished landmarks. It is a cultural and social centre in the heart of the city and features stunning views of the surrounding mountains and the North Atlantic Ocean.

During the banquet, Steering Committee Chair Phoebe Chen gave a historical overview of the MMM conferences and announced the venues for MMM 2018 (Bangkok, Thailand) and MMM 2019 (Thessaloniki, Greece), before awards for the best contributions were presented. Finally, participants were entertained by a small choir, and were even asked to participate in singing a traditional Icelandic folk song.

Acknowledgements

There are many people who deserve appreciation for their invaluable contributions to MMM 2017. First and foremost, we would like to thank our Program Committee Chairs, Laurent Amsaleg and Shin’ichi Satoh, who did excellent work in organizing the review process and helping us with the organization of the conference; indeed they are still hard at work with an MTAP special issue for selected papers from the conference. The Proceedings Chair, Gylfi Þór Guðmundsson, and Local Organization Chair, Marta Kristín Lárusdóttir, were also tirelessly involved in the conference organization and deserve much gratitude.

Other conference officers contributed to the organization and deserve thanks: Frank Hopfgartner and Esra Acar (demonstration chairs); Klaus Schöffmann, Werner Bailer and Jakub Lokoč (VBS Chairs); Yantao Zhang and Tao Mei (Sponsorship Chairs); all the Special Session Chairs listed above; the 150 strong Program Committee, who did an excellent job with the reviews; and the MMM Steering Committee, for entrusting us with the organization of MMM 2017.

Finally, we would like to thank our student volunteers (Atli Freyr Einarsson, Bjarni Kristján Leifsson, Björgvin Birkir Björgvinsson, Caroline Butschek, Freysteinn Alfreðsson, Hanna Ragnarsdóttir, Harpa Guðjónsdóttir), our hosts at Reykjavík University (in particular Arnar Egilsson, Aðalsteinn Hjálmarsson, Jón Ingi Hjálmarsson and Þórunn Hilda Jónasdóttir), the CP Reykjavik conference service, and all others who helped make the conference a success.