Diversity and Inclusion at ACM MMSys 2025

The 16th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference and its associated workshops (MMVE 2025 and NOSSDAV’25) were held from March 31st to April 4th 2025, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. With the intention to create a diverse and inclusive community for multimedia systems, several activities were followed. In this column, we provide a brief overview of different Diversity and Inclusion activities taken before and during the 16^th ACM MMSys’25.

Activities Before the Conference

Grants

Thanks to the generous support from the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM), we could provide some grants:

• Student Travel Grant: ACM SIGMM offered travel grants for students in order to promote participation and diversity of students in the conference. ACM SIGMM has centralised support for standard student travel for in-person participation, and any student member of SIGMM, and those who were the first author of an accepted paper, were eligible and encouraged to apply. Female and minority students’ applications were also encouraged.
• Young African Researcher Travel Awards: Travel grants were awarded specifically aimed to support young African researchers to attend the ACM MMSys’25 Conference and its co-located workshops. These awards targeted to foster diversity, promote knowledge exchange, and strengthen the multimedia systems research community across Africa. One of the eligibility criteria was to be affiliated with an African institution or to be an enrolled PhD student at an African higher learning institution.

Diversity in Papers

Previous to the conference, a brief analysis was done to understand how diverse and inclusive are the submitted papers. During the review process, paper reviewers indicated weather a paper tackled any aspect of diversity and inclusion by considering the following diversity criteria:

1. Scope
2. Approach
3. Evaluation procedure
4. Results
5. Other
6. This paper does not address any topics of diversity

It was found that the majority of papers did not address any topic of diversity, as shown in the diagram below. With these results in mind, we decided to organise a pabel about how to increase diversity and inclusion in future submissions to the conference.

Activities at the Conference: The Diversity Panel

Fuelled by the results of the study about diversity in MMSys’25 papers, the conference featured a panel discussion with the purpose to understand how diverse and inclusive are the topics, methodologies and evaluations in the papers submitted to the conference. In particular, the topics of discussion were (i) Implementing Diversity and Inclusion in research; (ii) Challenges in implementing Diversity and Inclusion; (iii) Inclusive and Diverse Practices; and (iv) Monitoring implementation progress.

Diversity and Inclusion panel discussion in this context targeted to explore how researchers/academia accommodate or work together with their relevant stakeholders or communities during their research activities, and during results dissemination such as in conferences.

To enable the discussion, we invited 4 panellists with different expertise both from academia and industry. These were: 

Professor Vali Lalioti University of the Arts London (United Kingdom)	Vali Lalioti is a pioneering designer, computer scientist, and innovator. She is Professor of Creative XR and Robotics and Director of Programmes at the Creative Computing Institute (CCI), University of the Arts London (UAL). She played a key role in developing the world’s first Virtual Reality (VR) systems in Germany. Her research focuses on human-robot interaction, robotic movement design, and XR for societal impact, spanning well-being, healthy aging, performance art, and the future of work. She pioneered BBC’s first Augmented Reality production (2003). As Founder-Director at CCI, she founded the Creative XR and Robotics Research Hub, that led the Institute’s expansion.
Associate Professor. Ketan Mayer-Patel  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Ketan Mayer-Patel is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina. His research generally focuses on multimedia systems, networking, and multicast applications. Currently, he is investigating model-based video coding, dynamic media coding models, and networking problems associated with multiple independent, but semantically related, media streams.
Dr. Marta Orduna  Nokia XR Lab; Madrid,Spain	Marta Orduna is a Telecommunication Engineer, Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunication Technologies and Services in 2016 and Master in Telecommunication Engineering in 2018 both from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). In 2023, she received her PhD from UPM entitled “Understanding and Assessing Quality of Experience in Immersive Communications”, reaching Cum Laude. In 2023, she joined Nokia Extended Reality Lab team in Spain, where she continues her research line of the PhD in the area of quality of experience in extended reality
Professor Gregor Schiele University Duisburg-Essen, Germany	Gregor Schiele is leading the research lab on Intelligent Embedded Systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Professor Gregor’s goal is to make deep learning algorithms so efficient that they can be executed efficiently on every computer device, including tiny embedded sensors and wearable XR devices. He is a big fan of the MMSys community and its constructive discussion culture.

Below, we provide a summary of the main findings on the four presented topics:

(1) Implementing Diversity and Inclusion in research

The panel discussion revealed that all panellists have worked or collaborated successfully with stakeholders outside their workplaces. Diversity and inclusion were mainly implemented via data collection for research work, co-creation, stakeholders’ workshops or seminars, and in research methodologies such as working with community in participatory action. The discussion highlighted the experience of our panellists with diversity measures as well as helped rising awareness in the audience as to what could they apply as diversity measures to their own work. 

(2) Challenges in implementing the Diversity and Inclusion

The following were mentioned as challenges in implementing diversity and inclusion in research and research dissemination activities:

1. Financial and time constraints,
2. Different organizational culture,
3. Difficulty to find a common time for collaboration due to different priorities,
4. Differences in language, organizational priorities and objectives.

(3) Inclusive and Diverse Practices

The panel discussed how to build a diverse and an inclusive conference in terms of topics, methodology (variety of approaches in pre-conference, during the conference and post conference). The following are some of the proposed practices:

1. In a conference, invite at least three best papers and three best demos from other related conferences to present their work and showcase their demos respectively.
2. Co-location of at least two conferences or workshop with related or complementing themes.
3. Focus on relevant related conferences to find a match which will lead to run a common workshop, this will build relation that can lead to conferences co-location hence diversity and inclusion.
4. Invite University graduates employers and   equipment vendors or manufacturers to participate and exhibit their products in conferences.
5. Provide avenue in conferences for stakeholders to interact with academia such as in roundtable discussion or debates between academia vs industry and keynote presentation from industry/stakeholders.
6. Run a flagship workshops or conferences with switching roles, for example this year the conference is for academia while industry/stakeholders are invited and assigned minor roles, next year the conference is dominated by industry/stakeholders and academia are invited with minor roles in the conference
7. Run a conference with tracks of diverse and inclusive themes
8. In order to accommodate policy makers in conferences, suggestions were as follows:
   1. Invite high profile Government officials such as Ministers or Presidents to officiate or close a conference where they will spend few hours listening to policy brief aligned to the conference theme or to the major conference resolutions during conference opening or closing respectively.
   2. Seek audience with the officials to briefly discuss conference resolutions or issues raised during the conference relevant to their offices.

(4) Monitoring implementation progress

Panellists were required to discuss how to track and measure progress in implementing diversity and inclusion in future ACM MMSys conferences. Generally, this point appeared difficult or it was not well understood by the panellists. It received very few and short responses. Most of the responses were kind of recommendation to:

1. First set performance criteria which will be used as benchmarks for tracking and measuring implementation progress on diversity and inclusion.
2. Develop stages of diverse and inclusive such as early/infant stage, medium/growing stage and premium/mature stage to guide a monitoring process, performance parameters and monitoring tools for paper evaluation process and in pre, during and post conference.

Concluding Remarks

Diversity and Inclusion activities done at the ACM MMSys 2025 served as important steps in nurturing diverse and inclusive multimedia system community. The activities comprised of travel grants supporting underrepresented and young African researchers, together with panel discussion at the conference. Although paper review analysis discovered that diversity topics remain underrepresented in paper submissions, this finding served as a catalyst for a rigorous panel discussion, that leads to concrete recommendations.  Going forward, the multimedia systems community is encouraged to adopt a smart framework with progress stages and performance parameters to monitor and track progress of diversity and inclusion in the ACM MMSys conference series.