Dear Readers,
Each year SIGMM, like all ACM SIGs, produces an annual report summarising our activities which includes our sponsored and i-cooperation conferences and also the initiatives we are undertaking to support our community and broaden participation. The report also includes our significant papers, our awards given and the major issues that face us going forward. Below is the main text of the SIGMM report 2017-2018 which is augmented by further details on our conferences which is provided by the ACM Office. We hope you enjoy reading this ad learning about what SIGMM does.
SIGMM Annual Report (2018)
Prepared by SIGMM Chair (Alan Smeaton),
Vice Chair (Nicu Sebe), and Conference Director (Gerald Friedland)
August 6th, 2018
Mission: SIGMM provides an international interdisciplinary forum for researchers, engineers, and practitioners in all aspects of multimedia computing, communication, storage and application. |
1. Awards:
SIGMM gives out three awards each year and these were as follows:
- SIGMM Technical Achievement Award for lasting contributions to multimedia computing, communications and applications was presented to Arnold W.M. Smeulders, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The award was given in recognition of his outstanding and pioneering contributions to defining and bridging the semantic gap in content-based image retrieval.
- SIGMM 2016 Rising Star Award was given to Dr Liangliang Cao of HelloVera. AI for his significant contributions in large-scale multimedia recognition and social media mining.
- SIGMM Outstanding PhD Thesis in Multimedia Computing Award was given to Chien-Nan (Shannon) Chen for a thesis entitled Semantics-Aware Content Delivery Framework For 3D Tele-Immersion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US.
2. Significant Papers:
The SIGMM flagship conference, ACM Multimedia 2017, was held in Mountain View, Calif. And presented the following awards plus other awards for Best Grand Challenge Video Captioning Paper, Best Grand Challenge Social Media Prediction Paper, Best Brave New Idea Paper:
- Best paper award to “Adversarial Cross-Modal Retrieval”, by Bokun Wang, Yang Yang, Xing Xu, Alan Hanjalic, Heng Tao Shen
- Best student paper award to “H-TIME: Haptic-enabled Tele-Immersive Musculoskeletal Examination”, by Yuan Tian, Suraj Raghuraman, Thiru Annaswamy, Aleksander Borresen, Klara Nahrstedt, Balakrishnan Prabhakaran
- Best demo award 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.
- Best Open source software award to “TensorLayer: A Versatile Library for Efficient Deep Learning Development” by Hao Dong, Akara Supratak, Luo Mai, Fangde Liu, Axel Oehmichen, Simiao Yu, Yike Guo.
The 9th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Systems (MMSys 2018), was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and presented a range awards including:
- Best paper award to “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming for Multi-Viewpoint Omnidirectional Videos” by Xavier Corbillon, Francesca De Simone, Gwendal Simon and Pascal Frossard.
- Best student-paper award to “Want to Play DASH? A Game Theoretic Approach for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP” by Abdelhak Bentaleb, Ali C. Begen, Saad Harous and Roger Zimmermann.
The International Conference in Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) 2018 was held in Yokohama, Japan, and presented a range of awards including:
- Best paper award to “Learning Joint Embedding with Multimodal Cues for Cross-Modal Video-Text Retrieval” by Niluthpol Mithun, Juncheng Li, Florian Metze and Amit Roy-Chowdhury.
The best paper and best student paper from each of these three conferences were then reviewed by a specially set up committee to select one paper which has been nominated for Communications of the ACM Research Highlights and that is presently under consideration.
In addition to the above, SIGMM presented the 2017 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award to the paper “Automatic Generation of Visual-Textual Presentation Layout” (TOMM vol. 12, Issue 2) by Xuyong Yang, Tao Mei, Ying-Qing Xu, Yong Rui, and Shipeng Li.
3. Significant Programs that Provide a Springboard for Further Technical Efforts
- SIGMM provided support for student travel through grants, at all of our SIGMM-sponsored conferences.
- Apart from the specific sessions dedicated to open source and datasets, the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys) has started to provide official ACM badging for articles that make artifacts available. This year, our second year for doing this, has marked a record with 45% of the articles published at the conference acquiring such a reproducibility badge.
4. Innovative Programs Providing Service to Some Part of Our Technical Community
- A large part of our research area in SIGMM is driven by the availability of large datasets, usually used for training purposes. Recent years have shown a large growth in the emergence of openly available datasets coupled with grand challenge events at our conferences and workshops. Mostly these are driven by our corporate researchers but this allows all of our researchers the opportunity to carry out their research at scale. This provides great opportunities for our community.
- Following the lead of SIGARCH we have commissioned a study of gender distribution among the SIGMM conferences, conference organization and awards. This report will be completed and presented at our flagship conference in October. We have also commissioned a study of the conferences and journals which mostly influence, and are influenced by, our own SIGMM conferences as an opportunity for some self-reflection on our origins, and our future. Both these follow an open call for new initiatives to be supported by SIGMM.
- SIGMM Conference Director Gerald Friedland worked with several volunteers from SIGMM to improve the content and organization of ACM Multimedia and connected conferences. Volunteer Dayid Ayman Shamma used data science methods to analyze several ACM MM conferences in the past five years with the goal of identifying biases and patterns of irregularities. Some results were presented at the ACM MM TPC meeting. Volunteers Hayley Hung and Martha Larson gave an account of their expectations and experiences with ACM Multimedia and Dr. Friedland himself volunteered as a reviewer for conferences of similar size and importance, including NIPS and CSCW and approached the chairs to get external feedback into what can be improved in the review process. Furthermore, in September, Dr. Friedland will travel to Berlin to visit Lutz Prechelt, who invented a review quality management system. The results of this work will be included into a conference handbook that will put down standard recommendations of best practices for future organizers of SIGMM conferences. We expect the book to be finished by the end of 2018.
- Last year SIGMM made a decision to try to co-locate conferences and other events as much as possible and the ACM Multimedia conference was co-located with the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2016 with joint workshops and tutorials. This year the ACM MultiMedia Systems (MMSys) conference was co-located with the 10th International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE2018), the16th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames2018), the 28th ACM SIGMM Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV2018) and the 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV2018). In addition, the Technical Program Committee meeting for the Multimedia Conference was co-located with the ICMR conference.
5. Events or Programs that Broaden Participation
- SIGMM has approved the launch of a new conference series called Multimedia Asia which will commence in 2019. This will be run by the SIGMM China Chapter and consolidates two existing multimedia-focused conferences in Asia under the sponsorship and governance of SIGMM. This follows a very detailed review and the successful location for the inaugural conference in 2019 will be announced at our flagship conference in October 2018.
- The Women / Diversity in Multimedia Lunch at ACM MULTIMEDIA 2017 (previously the Women’s Lunch) continued this year with an enlarged program of featured speakers and discussion which led to the call for the gender study in Multimedia mentioned earlier.
- SIGMM continues to pursue an active approach to nurturing the careers of our early stage researchers. The “Emerging Leaders” event (formerly known as Rising Stars) skipped a year in 2017 but will be happening again in 2018 at the Multimedia Conference. Giving these early career researchers the opportunity to showcase their vision helps to raise their visibility and helps SIGMM to enlarge the pool of future volunteers.
- The expansion we put in place in our social media communication team has proven to be a shrewd move with a large growth in our website traffic and raised profile on social media. We also invite conference attendees to post on twitter and/or Facebook about papers, demos, talks that they think are most thought provoking and forward looking and the most active of these are rewarded with a free registration at a future SIGMM-sponsored conference.
6. Issues for SIGMM in the next 2-3 years
- Like other SIGs, we realize that improving the diversity of the community we serve is essential to continuing our growth and maintaining our importance and relevance. This includes diversity in gender, in geographical location, and in many other facets. We have started to address these through some of the initiatives mentioned earlier, and at our flagship conference in 2017 we ran a Workshop emphasizing contributions focusing on research from South Africa and the African continent in general.
- Leadership and supporting young researchers in the early stages of their careers is also important and we highlight this through 2 of our regular awards (Rising Stars and Best Thesis). The “Emerging Leaders” event (formerly known as Rising Stars) skipped a year in 2017 but will be happening again in 2018 at the Multimedia Conference.
- We wish to reach to other SIGs with whom we could have productive engagement because we see multimedia as a technology enabler as well as an application unto itself. To this end we will continue to try to hold joint panels or workshops at our conferecnes.
- Our research area is marked by the growth and availability of open datasets and grand challenge competitions held at our conferences and workshops. These datasets are often provided from the corporate sector and this is both an opportunity for us to do research on datasets otherwise unavailable to us, as well as being a threat to the balance between corporate influence and independence.
- In a previous annual report we highlighted the difficulties caused by a significant portion of our conference proceedings not being indexed by Thomson Web of Science. In a similar vein we find our conference proceedings are not used as input into CSRankings, a metrics-based ranking of Computer Science institutions worldwide. Publishing at venues which are considered in CSRankings’ operation is important to much of our community and while we are in the process of trying to re-dress this, support of ACM on making this case would be welcome.