SIGMM Records: News, Statistics, and Call for Contributions & Suggestions

Authors: Pablo Cesar, Mario Montagud, Carsten Griwodz

Affiliations: CWI, University of Valencia & i2CAT Foundation, Simula & University of Oslo

 

A new editorial team has committed to lead the ACM SIGMM Records since the issue of January 2017. The goal is to consolidate the Records as a primary source of information and a communication vehicle for the multimedia community. With these objectives in mind, the Records were re-organized around three main categories (Open Science, Information, and Opinion), for which specific sections and columns were created (more details in http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/08/sigmm-records-serving-the-community/).

statistics october 2018

Since then, all sections and columns have provided relevant and high-quality contributions, with a higher impact than anticipated. Since the new epoch of the Records, apart from new columns, two additional initiatives have been incorporated:

  • Best social media reporter: It was decided to award the SIGMM members with the most intense and valuable posts on Social Media during the SIGMM conferences. The selected Best Social Media Reporters are asked to provide a post-conference report to be published in the Records, and get a free registration to one of the upcoming SIGMM conferences. Up to now, the awardees have been: Miriam Redi (ICMR 2017), Christian Timmerer (MMSYS 2017), Benoit Huet and Conor Keighrey (MM 2017), Cathal Gurrin (ICMR 2018) and Gwendal Simon (MMSYS 2018). The criteria for the awards are specified here: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/20/awarding-the-best-social-media-reporters/
  • Section on QoE: Starting in the third issue of 2018 (September 2018), the Records include a new section on QoE, edited by Tobias Hoßfeld and Christian Timmerer. You can find here the introduction column: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2018/09/08/quality-of-experience-column-an-introduction/ 

Apart from the recurrent sections, the community has as well contributed with relevant feature articles. Some examples include the article about the flow of ideas around SIGMM conferences by Lexing Xie, the article about ACM Fellows in SIGMM by Alan Smeaton, the SIGMM Annual Report (2018) by the Chairs, and an article about data driven statistics and trends in SIGMM conferences by David Ayman Shamma.

Finally, the editorial team is also working on infrastructural aspects together with ACM. First, an effective communication protocol with the ACM Digital Library has been established, enabling the publication of the issues and individual contributions in HTML format. SIGMM has indeed been pioneering in adopting the HTML format in the publication of articles. Second, the process for migrating the Records website to an ACM server and domain has started, and should be completed before the end of the year.

Pablo Cesar, the editor-in-chief, presented the new team, structure and impact at ACM MM 2017 and will update the community during ACM MM2018.

pablo_acm mm

 

Reach of the SIGMM Records

Since August 2018, we have been collecting statistics about visitors and visits to the Records website, and making use of Social Media for disseminating the contributions and news. In these 13 months, the daily number of visitors have ranged approximately between 100 and 400, being this variation strongly influenced by the publication of Social Media posts promoting published contents. In these last 13 months, more than 80000 visitors and nearly 500000 visits (i.e. clicks) have been registered.

The top 3 countries with highest number of visitors are US (>19000), China (>10000) and Germany (nearly 7000), and the top 10 all surpass 2000 visitors. Likewise, the top 3 posts with highest impact, in terms of number of visits are listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Top 3 posts on the Records website with highest impact

Post Publication Date Number of Visits
Impact of the New @sigmm Records September 2017 3051 visits
Standards Column: JPEG and MPEG May 2017 1374 visits
Practical Guide to Using the YFCC100M and MMCOMMONS on a Budget October 2017 786 visits

Finally, the top 3 referring sites (i.e., external websites from which visitors have clicked an URL to access the Records website) are Facebook (around 2500 references), Google (around 2500 references) and Twitter (>700 references). According to this, it seems clear that the social media strategy implemented by the editorial team is positively impacting the Records.

Regarding Social Media, two @sigmm channels are being used: a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@sigmm). The number of followers is still not high in Facebook (47), but it has significantly increased in Twitter (247) compared to the previous report. However, the impact of the posts on these platforms, in terms of reach, likes and shares is noteworthy. In Facebook, there are posts that have reached more than 1000 users, and in Twitter there are many tweets with tens of re-tweets and likes.

Contribute!

Our mission is to keep improving and consolidate the Records, and we are very open to getting extra help and feedback. So, if you would like to become member of our team, or simply have suggestions or ideas, please drop us a line!

We hope you are enjoying every new edition of the Records.

The Editorial team

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