Conference/Workshop Program Highlights

ACM Multimedia 2013 was held at the CCIB (Centre de Conventions Internacional de Barcelona) from October 21st to October 25th, 2012 in Barcelona. The Art Exhibition has been held for the entire duration of the conference at the FAD (Forment de les Arts i del Disseny) in the center of the city while the workshops were held in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Balmes building during the first two days of the conference (Oct. 21-Oct 22). It was the first time the conference was held in Spain and it offered a high-quality program and a few notable innovations. Dr. Nozha Boujemaa from INRIA, France, Dr. Alejandro Jaimes from Yahoo! Labs, Spain and Prof. Nicu Sebe from the University of Trento, Italy were the general co-chairs of the conference. Dr. Daniel Gatica-Perez from IDIAP & EPFL, Switzerland, Dr. David A. Shamma from Yahoo! Labs, USA, Prof. Marcel Worring from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Prof. Roger Zimmermann from the National University of Singapore, Singapore were the program co-chairs. The entire organization committee is listed in Appendix A. The number of participants was 544. The main conference was attended by 476 participants out of which 425 paid and 51 participants were special cases (sponsors, student volunteers, etc.), and 68 participants attended workshops only. The tutorials which were free of charge were registered by 312 in advance. Multimedia art exhibition was open to public from Oct. 21 to Oct.28, and visited by more than 2,000 visitors. The total revenue of the conference was $318,151, and the surplus was $25,430.

The venue (CCIB)

Below is the list of the program components of Multimedia 2013.

• ž Technical Papers: Full and Short papers
• ž Keynote Talks
• ž SIGMM Achievement Award Talk, Ph.D Thesis Award Talk
• ž Panel
• ž Brave New Ideas
• ž Multimedia Grand Challenge Solutions
• ž Technical Demos
• ž Open Source Software Competition
• ž Doctoral Symposium
• ž Art Exhibition and Reception
• ž Tutorials
• ž Workshops
• ž Awards and Banquet

Innovations made for Multimedia 2013:

In attempt to continuously improve ACM Multimedia and ensure its vibrant role for the multimedia community, we have made a number of enhancements for this year’s conference:

• The Technical Program Committee defined twelve Technical Areas for major focus for this year’s conference, including introducing new Technical Areas for Music & Audio and Crowdsourcing to reflect their growing interest and promise. We have also changed the names of some traditional Technical Areas and provided extensive description of each area to help the authors choosing the most appropriate Technical Area for their manuscripts.
• We have introduced a new role in the organization of the conference: the author’s advocate. His explicit role was to listen to the authors, and to help them if reviews are clearly below average quality. The authors could request the mediation of the author’s advocate after the reviews have been sent to them and they had to clearly justify the reasons why such mediation is needed (the reviews or the meta-review were below average quality). The task of the advocate was to investigate carefully the matter and to request additional review or reexamination of the decision of the particular manuscript. This year, the author’s advocate was Pablo Cesar from CWI, The Netherlands.
• We have decided to keep a couple of plenary sessions which will bring singular focus to conference activities: keynotes, Multimedia Grand Challenge competition, Best Paper session, Technical Achievement Award and Best PhD Award sessions. The other technical sessions are held in parallel to allow pursuit of more specialized interests at the conference. We have limited the number of parallel session to no more than 3 to minimize the risk of having overlapping interests.
• The use of video spotlights for advertising the works to be presented. These were meant to offer all attendees an opportunity to become aware of the content of each paper, and thus to be attracted to attend the corresponding poster or talk.
• Workshops and Tutorials are held on separate days from the main conference in order to reduce conflict with the regular Technical Program.
• The Multimedia Art Exhibition featured both invited and selected artists. It was open for the duration of the conference in the satellite venue located in the center of the city.
• Following the last two years’ precedent, Tutorials are made free for all participants.
• Recognizing that students are the lifeblood of our next generation of multimedia thinkers, this year’s Student Travel Grant was greatly expanded. We had a total amount of $26,000 received from SIGMM ($16,000) and NSF ($10,000) that supported 35 students.
• Finally, we have decided to provide open access for the community to the proceedings available in the ACM Digital Libraries. As such, no USB proceedings were handed over to the participants encouraging everyone to get online access.

Technical Program

Following the guidelines of the ACM Multimedia Review Committee, the conference was structured into 12 Areas, with a two-tier TPC, a double-blind review process, and a target acceptance rate of 20% for long papers and 27.7% for short papers. Based on the experience from ACM Multimedia 2012 and the responses to our “Call for Areas” that we issued to the community, we selected the following Areas.

1. Art, Entertainment, and Culture
2. Authoring and Collaboration
3. Crowdsourcing
4. Media Transport and Delivery
5. Mobile & Multi-device
6. Multimedia Analysis
7. Multimedia HCI
8. Music & Audio
9. Search, Browsing, and Discovery
10. Security and Forensics
11. Social Media & Presence
12. Systems and Middleware

The Technical Program Committee was first created by appointing Area Chairs (ACs). A total of 29 colleagues agreed to serve in this role. Each Area was represented by two ACs, with exception of two Areas (Multimedia Analysis and Search, Browsing, and Discovery) whose scope has traditionally attracted the largest proportion of papers and so required further coordination. The added topic diversity brought an increase in gender diversity to the ACs, which increased from approximately 12% in previous years to 22% for 2013. We also made a conscious effort to bring new talent and excellence into the community and to better represent emerging trends in the field. For this we appointed many young and well recognized ACs who served in this role for the first time. For each junior AC, we co-appointed a senior researcher as their co-AC to aid in their shepherding. In a second step, the Area Chairs were responsible for appointing the TPC members (reviewers) for their coordinated areas. This was a large effort to grow the TPC base for the conference as well as ensure proper expertise was represented in each area. We coupled this with a hard goal of limiting the number of submissions assigned to each TPC member for review. For example, two years ago, the average number of papers assigned to a reviewer was 9 with over 38% of the approximately 225 TPC members receiving 10 or more papers to review. With our design, we had a total of 398 reviewers receiving an average of 4.13 papers per reviewer. While we were unable to keep a hard ceiling limitation, only 2.51% of the TPC received 10 or more papers to review—all TPC members who had agreed to serve in more than one area. The Area Chairs were in charge of assigning all papers for review, and each submission was reviewed double-blind by three TPC members. Reviews and reviewer assignments of papers co-authored by Area Chairs, Program Chairs, and General Chairs were handled by Program Chairs who had no conflicts of interest for each specific case. Another novelty introduced in the reviewing process was to set the paper submission deadline to a significantly earlier date than previous years, in order to allocate more time for reviews, rebuttals, discussions, and final decisions. Despite the reduced time given to authors, the response to the Call for Papers was enthusiastic with a total of 235 long papers and 278 short papers going through review. The authors of long papers were asked to write a rebuttal after receiving the reviews. A new element in the reviewing process was the introduction of the Author’s Advocate figure, created to provide authors with an independent channel to express concerns about the quality of the reviews for their papers, and to raise a flag about these reviews. All cases were brought to the attention to the corresponding Area Chair. After evaluating each case reported to him (16 reviews out of 761 long paper reviews), the Author’s Advocate recommended in 5 cases that new reviews were generated and added to the discussion. The reviewers had a period for on-line discussion of reviews and rebuttals, after which the Area Chairs drafted a meta-review for each paper. Decisions on long and short papers were made at the TPC meeting held at the University of Amsterdam on June 11, 2013. The meeting was physically attended by one of the General Chairs, three of the Program Chairs, the Author’s Advocate, and 86% of the ACs. Many of the ACs who were unable to attend were tele-present online for discussions. On the first half day of the TPC meeting, the Area Chairs worked in breakout sessions to discuss the papers that were weak accepts and weak rejects, with the exception of conflict of interest papers which were handled out of band as previously mentioned. In the second half of the first day, the ACs met in a plenary session where they reviewed the clear accepts and defended the decisions on the borderline papers based on the papers themselves, reviews, meta-reviews, on-line discussions, and authors’ rebuttal comments. In many cases, an emergency reviewer was added if there was clear intersection with a related submission area. If a paper had any conflict of interest during the plenary session with an Area, Program, or General Chair, they were excused from the room. On June 12, 2013, the Program Chairs finalized the process and conference program in a separate meeting—arranging the sessions by thematic narratives and not by submission area to promote cross-area conversations during the conference itself. The review process resulted in an overall acceptance rate of 20.0% for long papers and 27.7% for short papers (the distribution of submissions and the acceptance rate for each one of the 12 areas is shown in the graph below). All accepted long papers were shepherded by the Area Chairs themselves or by qualified TPC members who were in charge of verifying that the revised papers adequately addressed concerns raised by the reviewers and changes promised by authors in their rebuttals. This step ensured that all of the accepted papers are of the highest quality possible. In addition, four papers with high review scores were nominated at the TPC meeting as candidates for the Best Paper Award. Each nominated paper had to be successfully championed and defended by the ACs from that area. The winner was announced at the Conference Banquet.

ACM Multimedia 2013 Program at a Glance

The entire program of ACM Multimedia 2013 is shown below.

Workshop session

Conference venue

Opening ceremony

Keynote presentation

Poster/Demo session

SIGMM Achievement Award Talk

Keynote Talks

Multimedia Framed Dr. Elizabeth F. Churchill (Ebay Research Labs) Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013 Abstract: Multimedia is the combination of several media forms. Information designers, educationalists and artists are concerned with questions such as: Is text, or audio or video, or a combination of all three, the best format for the message? Should another modality (e.g., haptics/touch, olfaction) be invoked instead to make the message more effective and/or the experience more engaging? How does the setting affect perception/reception? How does framing affect people’s experience of multimedia? How is the artifact changed through interaction with audience members? In this presentation, I will talk about people’s experience of multimedia artifacts like videos. I will discuss the ways in which framing affects how we experience multimedia. Framing can be intentional–scripted creations produced with clear intent by technologists, designers, media producers, media artists, film-makers, archivists, documentarians and architects. Framing can also be unintentional. Everyday acts of interest and consumption turn us, the viewers, into co-producers of the experiences of the multimedia artifacts we have viewed. We download, annotate, comment and share multimedia artifacts online. Our actions are reflected in view counts, displayed comments and content ranking. Our actions therefore change how multimedia artifacts are interpreted and understood by others. Drawing on examples from the history of film and of performance art, from current social media research and from research conducted with collaborators over the past 16 years, I will illustrate how content understanding is modulated by context, by the “framing” of the content. I will consider three areas of research that are addressing the issue of framing, and that have implications for our understanding of ‘multimedia’ consumption, now and in the future: (1) The psychology and psychophysiology of multimedia as multimodal experience; (2) Emerging practices with contemporary social media capture and sharing from personal devices; and (3) Innovations in social media and audience analytics focused on more deeply understanding media consumption. I will conclude with some technical excitements, design/development challenges and experiential possibilities that lie ahead. Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is Director of Human Computer Interaction at eBay Research Labs (ERL) in San Jose, California. Formerly a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, she founded, staffed and managed the Internet Experiences Group. Until September of 2006, she worked at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), California, in the Computing Science Lab (CSL). Prior to that she formed and led the Social Computing Group at FX Palo Laboratory, Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto. Originally a psychologist by training, throughout her career Elizabeth has focused on understanding people’s social and collaborative interactions in their everyday digital and physical contexts. With over 100 peer-reviewed publications and 5 edited books, topics she has written about include implicit learning, human-agent systems, mixed initiative dialogue systems, social aspects of information seeking, digital archive and memory, and the development of emplaced media spaces. She has been a regular columnist for ACM interactions since 2008. Elizabeth has a BSc in Experimental Psychology, an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems, both from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. In 2010, she was recognised as a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Elizabeth is the current Executive Vice President of ACM SigCHI (Human Computer Interaction Special Interest Group). She is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Media X, the industry affiliate program to Stanford’s H-STAR Institute. The Space between the Images Leonidas J. Guibas (Stanford University) Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013 Abstract: Multimedia content has become a ubiquitous presence on all our computing devices, spanning the gamut from live content captured by device sensors such as smartphone cameras to immense databases of images, audio and video stored in the cloud. As we try to maximize the utility and value of all these petabytes of content, we often do so by analyzing each piece of data individually and foregoing a deeper analysis of the relationships between the media. Yet with more and more data, there will be more and more connections and correlations, because the data captured comes from the same or similar objects, or because of particular repetitions, symmetries or other relations and self-relations that the data sources satisfy. This is particularly true for media of a geometric character, such as GPS traces, images, videos, 3D scans, 3D models, etc. In this talk we focus on the “space between the images”, that is on expressing the relationships between different multimedia data items. We aim to make such relationships explicit, tangible, first class objects that themselves can be analyzed, stored, and queried — irrespective of the media they originate from. We discuss mathematical and algorithmic issues on how to represent and compute relationships or mappings between media data sets at multiple levels of detail. We also show how to analyze and leverage networks of maps and relationships, small and large, between inter-related data. The network can act as a regularizer, allowing us to to benefit from the “wisdom of the collection” in performing operations on individual data sets or in map inference between them. We will illustrate these ideas using examples from the realm of 2D images and 3D scans/shapes — but these notions are more generally applicable to the analysis of videos, graphs, acoustic data, biological data such as microarrays, homeworks in MOOCs, etc. This is an overview of joint work with multiple collaborators, as will be discussed in the talk. Prof. Leonidas Guibas obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford under the supervision of Donald Knuth. His main subsequent employers were Xerox PARC, DEC/SRC, MIT, and Stanford. He is currently the Paul Pigott Professor of Computer Science (and by courtesy, Electrical Engineering) at Stanford University. He heads the Geometric Computation group and is part of the Graphics Laboratory, the AI Laboratory, the Bio-X Program, and the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. Professor Guibas’ interests span geometric data analysis, computational geometry, geometric modeling, computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, ad hoc communication and sensor networks, and discrete algorithms. Some well-known past accomplishments include the analysis of double hashing, red-black trees, the quad-edge data structure, Voronoi-Delaunay algorithms, the Earth Mover’s distance, Kinetic Data Structures (KDS), Metropolis light transport, and the Heat-Kernel Signature. Professor Guibas is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow and winner of the ACM Allen Newell award.

SIGMM Talks

SIGMM Achievement Award Talk Dick Bulterman, CWI, The Netherlands Friday, Oct. 25, 2013 The 2013 winner of SIGMM award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Prof. Dr. Dick Bulterman. The ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions over a researcher’s career. Prof. Dick Bulterman has been selected for his outstanding technical contributions in multimedia authoring, media annotation, and social sharing from research through standardization to entrepreneurship, and in particular for promoting international Web standards for multimedia authoring and presentation (SMIL) in the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group as well as his dedicated involvement in the SIGMM research community for many years. Dr. Dick Bulterman has been a long time intellectual leader in the area of temporal modeling and support for complex multimedia system. His research has led to the development of several widely used multimedia authoring systems and players. He developed the Amsterdam Hypermedia Model, the CMIF document structure, the CMIFed authoring environment, the GRiNS editor and player, and a host of multimedia demonstrator applications. In 1999, he started the CWI spinoff company called Oratrix Development BV, and he worked as CEO to widely deliver this software. He is currently a Research Group Head of the Distributed and Interactive Systems at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is also a Full Professor of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His research interests are multimedia authoring and document processing. Dick has a strong international reputation for the development of the domain-specific temporal language for multimedia (SMIL). Much of this software has been incorporated into the widely used Ambulant Open Source SMIL Player, which has served to encourage development and use of time-based multimedia content. His conference publications and book on SMIL have helped to promote SMIL and its acceptance as a W3C standard. Dick’s recent work on social sharing of video will likely prove influential in upcoming Interactive TV products. This work has already been recognized in the academic community, earning the ACM SIGMM best paper award at ACM MM 2008 and also at the EUROITV conference. SIGMM Ph.D Thesis Award Talk Xirong Li, Remin University, China Friday, Oct. 25, 2013 The SIGMM Ph.D. Thesis Award Committee recommended this year’s award for the outstanding Ph.D. thesis in multimedia computing, communications and applications to Dr. Xirong Li. The committee considered Dr. Li’s dissertation titled “Content-based visual search learned from social media” as worthy of the award as it substantially extends the boundaries for developing content-based multimedia indexing and retrieval solutions. In particular, it provides fresh new insights into the possibilities for realizing image retrieval solutions in the presence of vast information that can be drawn from the social media. The committee considered the main innovation of Dr. Li’s work to be in the development of the theory and algorithms providing answers to the following challenging research questions: (a) what determines the relevance of a social tag with respect to an image, (b) how to fuse tag relevance estimators, (c) which social images are the informative negative examples for concept learning, (d) how to exploit socially tagged images for visual search and (e) how to personalize automatic image tagging with respect to a user’s preferences. The significance of the developed theory and algorithms lies in their power to enable effective and efficient deployment of the information collected from the social media to enhance the datasets that can be used to learn automatic image indexing mechanisms (visual concept detection) and to make this learning more personalized for the user. Dr. Xirong Li received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Tsinghua University, China, in 2005 and 2007, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2012, all in computer science. The title of his thesis is “Content-based visual search learned from social media”. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Key Lab of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Renmin University of China. His research interest is image search and multimedia content analysis. Dr. Li received the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award 2012, Best Paper Nominee of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval 2012, Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad 2011, and the Best Paper Award of the ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval 2010. He served as publicity co-chair for ICMR 2013. Panel Cross-Media Analysis and Mining Wednesday, Oct 23, 2013 Panelists:Mark Zhang, Alberto del Bimbo, Selcuk Candan, Alexander Hauptmann, Ramesh Jain, Alexis Joly, Yueting Zhuang Motivation Today there are lots of heterogeneous and homogeneous media data from multiple sources, such as news media websites, microblog, mobile phone, social networking websites, and photo/video sharing websites. Integrated together these media data represent different aspects of the real-world and help document the evolution of the world. Consequently, it is impossible to correctly conceive and to appropriately understand the world without exploiting the data available on these different sources of rich multimedia content simultaneously and synergistically. Cross-media analysis and mining is a research area in the general field of multimedia content analysis which focuses on the exploitation of the data with different modalities from multiple sources simultaneously and synergistically to discover knowledge and understand the world. Specifically, we emphasize two essential elements in the study of cross-media analysis that help differentiate cross-media analysis from the rest of the research in multimedia content analysis or machine learning. The first is the simultaneous co-existence of data from two or more different data sources. This element indicates the concept of “cross”, e.g., cross-modality, cross-source, and cross cyberspace to reality. Cross-modality means that heterogeneous features are obtained from the data in different modalities; cross-source means that the data may be obtained across multiple sources (domains or collections); cross-space means that the virtual world (i.e., cyberspace) and the real world (i.e., reality) complement each other. The second is the leverage of different types of data across multiple sources for strengthening the knowledge discovery, for example, discovering the (latent) correlation or synergy between the data with different modalities across multiple sources, transferring the knowledge learned from one domain (e.g., a modality or a space) to generate knowledge in another related domain, and generating a summary with the data from multiple sources. There two essential elements help promote cross-media analysis and mining as a new, emerging, and important research area in today’s multimedia research. With the emphasis on knowledge discovery, cross-media analysis is different from the traditional research areas such as cross-lingual translation. On the other hand, with the general scenarios of the leverage of different types of data across multiple sources for strengthening the knowledge discovery, cross-media analysis and mining addresses a broader series of problems than the traditional research areas such as transfer learning. Overall, cross-media analysis and mining is beneficial for many applications in data mining, causal inference, machine learning, multimedia, and public security. Like other emerging hot topics in multimedia research, cross-media analysis and mining also has a number of fundamental and controversial issues that must be addressed in order to have a full and complete understanding of the research in this topic. These issues include but are not limited to whether or not there exists a unified representation or modeling for the same semantic concept from different media, and if there is what such unified representation or modeling is; whether or not there exists any “law” that governs the topic evolution and development over the time in different media and if there is what such “law” is and how it is formulated; whether or not there exists a mapping for a conceptual or semantic activity between the cyberspace and the real-world, and if there is what such a mapping is and how it is developed and formulated. Brave New Idea Program Brave New Ideas addressed long term research challenges, pointed to new research directions, or provided new insights or brave perspectives that pave the way to innovation. The selection process was different from the regular papers. First, submission of a 2 page abstract was requested. Then, the first selection was performed and a full paper was required for the selected abstracts and reviewed and chosen. We received 38 submissions for the first stage and 14 were invited to submit the full paper for the second reviewing stage. Finally, there were accepted 6 papers, which formed two sessions of oral presentations. Multimedia Grand Challenge Solutions We had received six challenges as shown below for the Multimedia Grand Challenge Solutions Program.

1. NHK – Where is beauty? Grand Challenge
2. Technicolor – Rich Multimedia Retrieval from Input Videos Grand Challenge
3. Yahoo! – Large-scale Flickr-tag Image Classification Grand Challenge
4. Huawei/3DLife – 3D human reconstruction and action recognition Grand Challenge
5. MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET – Temporal Segmentation and Annotation Grand Challenge
6. Microsoft: MSR – Bing Image Retrieval Grand Challenge

We received 34 proposals for this program, and 14 of them were accepted for the presentation. In order to promote submissions, all presentations in this program were awarded as Multimedia Grand Challenge Finalists. The best prize and two second best prizes were chosen and awarded. Requested by Technicolor, the Grand Challenge Multimodal Prize was also chosen and awarded. Technical Demonstrations We have received 80 excellent technical demonstrations proposals. The number of submissions was in line to the demonstrations received in the previous year. Three reviewers were assigned to each demo proposal, and finally 40 proposals were chosen. The best demo prize was awarded. Open Source Software Competition This year was the 6^th edition of the Open software competition being part of the ACM Multimedia program. The goal of this competition is to praise the invaluable contribution of researchers and software developers who advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, applications, and other multimedia software. This year we have received 16 submissions and after assigning three reviewers to each of them we have selected 11 for the competition. The best open source software was awarded. Doctoral Symposium Doctoral Symposium was meant as a forum for mentoring graduate students. It was held in the afternoon of Oct. 25 both in the oral and poster formats. We have received 19 proposals for doctoral symposium. We accepted 13 presentations (6 oral + poster and 7 additional posters). Additionally, there was organized a Doctoral Symposium lunch in which the students had the opportunity to talk to their assigned mentors. Finally, the best doctoral symposium paper was awarded. Multimedia Art Exhibition and Reception ACM Multimedia provided a rich Multimedia Art Exhibition to stimulate artists and researchers alike to meet and discover the frontiers of multimedia artistic communication. The Art Exhibition has attracted significant work from a variety of digital artists collaborating with research institutions. We have endeavored to select exhibits that achieved an interesting balance between technology and artistic intent. The techniques underpinning these artworks are relevant to several technical tracks of the conference, in particular those dealing with human-centered and interactive media. We had a satellite venue, FAD (Forment de les Arts i del Disseny), for the art exhibition located in the center of the city. The venue had a very good public access. The exhibition was open from Oct. 21 to Oct. 28 and visited by more than 2,000 visitors. The reception event was held with the artists on Oct. 23. We had selected 10 art works for the exhibition:

1. Emotion Forecast, Maurice Benayoun (City University of Hong Kong)
2. Critical, Anabela Costa (France)
3. Smile-Wall, Shen-Chi Chen, He-Lin Luo, Kuan-Wen Chen, Yu-Shan Lin, Hsiao-Lun Wang, Che-Yao Chan, Kai-Chih Huang, Yi-Ping Hung (National Taiwan University)
4. SOMA, Guillaume Faure (France)
5. A Feast of Shadow Puppetry, Zhenzhen Hu, Min Lin, Si Liu, Jiangguo Jiang, Meng Wang, Richang Hong, Shuicheng Yan, Hefei University of Technology and NUS
6. Tele Echo Tube, Hill Hiroki Kobayashi, Kaoru Saito, Akio Fujiwara (University of Tokyo)
7. 3D-Stroboscopy, Sujin Lee (Sogang University, South Korea)
8. The Qi of Calligraphy, He-Lin Luo, Yi-Ping Hung (Taiwan National University), I-Chun Chen (Tainan National University of the Arts)
9. Gestural Pen Animation, Sheng-Ying Pao and Kent Larson (MIT Media Lab, USA)
10. MixPerceptions, Jose San Pedro (Telefonica Research, Spain), Aurelio San Pedro (Escola Massana, Barcelona), Juan Pablo Carrascal (UPF, Barcelona), Matylda Szmukier (Telefonica Research, Spain)

Attending the Art Exhibition

San Pedro’s Mix Perceptions

Tutorials

We received in 14 tutorial proposals and we have selected 8 tutorials for the main program. All tutorials were half day and were held on Oct. 21 and 22 in parallel with the workshops in the in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Balmes building. Tutorials were made free for all participants and we received 312 pre-registrations. Gerald Friedland(ICSI)

Workshops

Workshops have always been an important part of the conference. Below is the list of workshops held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2013. We had 9 full day workshops and 4 half day workshops, which were held on Oct. 21-22 in parallel with the tutorials. We followed the rule from last year and two complementary workshop only registrations were provided for invited talks of each workshop to encourage participation of notable speakers.

Full Day Workshops (8)

1. 2nd International Workshop on Socially-Aware Multimedia (SAM 2013) Organizers: Pablo Cesar (CWI, NL) Matthew Cooper (FXPAL) David A. Shamma (Yahoo!) Doug Williams (BT)

1. 4th ACM/IEEE ARTEMIS 2013 International Workshop on Analysis and Retrieval of Tracked Events and Motion in Imagery Streams Organizers: Marco Bertini (University of Florence, Italy) Anastasios Doulamis (TU Crete, Greece) Nikolaos Doulamis (Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus) Jordi Gonzàlez (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) Thomas Moeslund (University of Aalborg, Denmark)

1. 5th International Workshop on Multimedia for Cooking and Eating Activities (CEA2013) Organizer: Kiyoharu Aizawa(Univ. of Tokyo, JP)

1. 4th International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU 2013) Organizers: Albert Ali Salah, Boğaziçi Univ., Turkey Hayley Hung, Delft Univ. of Technology, The Netherlands Oya Aran, Idiap Research Intitute, Switzerland Hatice Gunes, Queen Mary Univ. of London (QMUL), UK

1. International ACM Workshop on Crowdsourcing for Multimedia 2013 (CrowdMM 2013) Organizers: Wei-Ta Chu (National Chung Cheng University, TW) Martha Larson (Delft University of Technology, NL) Kuan-Ta Chen (Academia Sinica, TW)

1. First ACM MM Workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Information Retrieval for Healthcare (ACM MM MIIRH) Organizers: Jenny Benois-Pineau, University of Bordeaux 1, France Alexia Briasouli, CERTH -ITI Alex Hauptman, Carnegie-Mellon University, USA

1. Workshop on Personal Data Meets Distributed Multimedia Organizers: Vivek Singh, MIT, USA Tat-Seng Chua, NUS Ramesh Jain, University of California, Irvine, USA Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT, USA

1. Workshop on Immersive Media Experiences Organizers: Teresa Chambel, University of Lisbon, Portugal V. Michael Bove, MIT Media Lab, USA Sharon Strover, University of Texas at Austin, USAA Paula Viana, Polytechnic of Porto and INESC TEC, Portugal Graham Thomas, BBC, UK

1. Workshop on Event-based Media Integration and Processing Organizers: Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy Sang “Peter” Chin, Johns Hopkins University, US Giulia Boato, University of Trento, Italy Bogdan Ionescu, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Greece

Half Day Workshops (4)

1. ACM Multimedia Workshop on Geotagging and Its Applications Organizers: Liangliang Cao, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA Gerald Friedland, International Computer Science Institute, USA, Pascal Kelm, Technische Universitaet of Berlin, Germany

1. Data-driven challenge-based workshop ACM MM 2013(AVEC 2013) Organizers: Björn Schuller, TUM, Germany Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK Roddy Cowie, Queen’s University Belfast, UK Maja Pantic, Imperial College London, UK Jarek Krajewski, University of Wuppertal, Germany

1. 2nd ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for Ecological Data (MAED 2013) Organizers: Concetto Spampinato, University of Catania, Italy Vasileios Mezaris, CERTH, Greece Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI, The Netherlands

1. 3rd International Workshop on Interactive Multimedia on Mobile and Portable Devices(IMMPD’13) Organizers: Jiebo Luo, University of Rochester, USA Caifeng Shan, Philips Research, The Netherlands Ling Shao, The University of Sheffield, UK Minoru Etoh, NTT DOCOMO, Japan

Awards

Awards were given in almost all the programs except for short papers during the banquet that was organized at the conference venue. The following awards have been given: Best Paper Award Luoqi Liu, Hui Xu, Junliang Xing, Si Liu, Xi Zhou and Shuicheng Yan, National University of Singapore (NUS), “Wow! You Are So Beautiful Today!” Best Student Paper Award Hanwang Zhang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Yang Yang, Shuicheng Yan, Yue Gao and Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore (NUS), “Attributes-augmented Semantic Hierarchy for Image Retrieval” Grand Challenge 1st Place Award [Sponsored by Technicolor] Brendan Jou, Hongzhi Li, Joseph G. Ellis, Daniel Morozoff-Abegauz and Shih-Fu Chang, Digital Video & Multimedia (DVMM) Lab, Columbia University, “Structured Exploration of Who, What, When, and Where in Heterogenous Multimedia News Sources” Grand Challenge 2nd Place Award [Sponsored by Technicolor] Subhabrata Bhattacharya, Behnaz Nojavanasghari, Tao Chen, Dong Liu, Shih-Fu Chang, Mubarak Shah, University of Central Florida and Columbia University, “Towards a Comprehensive Computational Model for Aesthetic Assessment of Videos” Grand Challenge 3rd Place Award [Sponsored by Technicolor] Shannon Chen, Penye Xia, and Klara Nahrstedt, UIUC, “Activity-Aware Adaptive Compression: A Morphing-Based Frame Synthesis Application in 3DTI”

Program chairs during the banquet

Award ceremony

Banquet venue

Social program

Grand Challenge Multimodal Award [Sponsored by Technicolor] Chun-Che Wu, Kuan-Yu Chu, Yin-Hsi Kuo, Yan-Ying Chen, Wen-Yu Lee, Winston H. Hsu, National Taiwan University, Taiwan, “Search-Based Relevance Association with Auxiliary Contextual Cues” Best Demo Award Duong-Trung-Dung Nguyen, Mukesh Saini; Vu-Thanh Nguyen, Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore (NUS), “Jiku director: An online mobile video mashup system” Best Doctoral Symposium Paper Jules Francoise, Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), “Gesture-Sound Mapping by demonstration in Interactive Music Systems” Best Open Source Software Award Dmitry Bogdanov, Nicolas Wack, Emilia Gómez, Sankalp Gulati, Perfecto Herrera, Oscar Mayor, Gerard Roma, Justin Salamon, Jose Zapata Xavier Serra (UPF), “ESSENTIA: An Audio Analysis Library for Music Information Retrieval”

Prize amounts:

Sponsors:We had an incredible support from industries and funding organizations (38.5k euro). All the sponsors and the institutional supporters are listed in Appendix B. The sponsoring amount for each individual sponsor is as follows:

The benefits for the sponsors were honorary registrations and publicity, that is, the company logo was published on the website of the conference, in the Proceedings, and the Booklet. On top of these amounts we have received 16k$ from SIGMM and 10K from NSF for student travel grants.

Geographical distribution of the participants

We had 544 participants at the main conference and workshops. The main conference was attended by 476 participants out of which 425 paid and 51 participants were special cases (sponsors, student volunteers, etc.), and 68 participants attended only the workshops. The tutorials which were free of charge were registered by 312 in advance. Country-wise distribution is shown below. As shown in the list, the geographical distribution was wide meaning that we managed to attract participants from a large number of countries.

Survey

In order to gather opinions from the participants at ACM Multimedia 2013 we have performed a post-conference survey and the results are summarized in Appendix C. Here we summarize the 10 most important issues that were compiled after analyzing the answers received. The effort to gather all this information is the first of its kind at ACM Multimedia and we hope this tradition will be continued in the future. The results of the survey represent in our opinion a very good source of information for the future organizers.

1. Poster space too small
2. Many people still want USB proceedings!!
3. Oral topics in the same time slot overlapped too much. Need to diversify.
4. Need to attract more multimedia niche topics. Should not become a second rate CV conference
5. First day location hard to find. Workshop/tutorial better to be co-located with main conference
6. Senior members of MM community should participate in paper sessions more
7. Need to update web site program content and make it available earlier
8. Consider offering short spotlight talks for poster papers
9. Keep 15 mins for oral, but have them presented again in poster session for more discussion
10. SIGMM business meeting too long. Not enough time for QA.

Conclusion

ACM Multimedia 2013 was a great success with a great number of submissions, an excellent technical program, attractive program components, and stimulating events. As a result, we welcomed a large number of participants, in line with our initial expectation. There were a few problems see above but this is only natural. We greatly acknowledge those who have contributed to the success of ACM Multimedia 2013. We thank the organizers of ACM Multimedia 2012 for their useful suggestions and comments which helped us to improve the organization the 2013 edition. We also thank them for giving us the template for the conference booklet. We thank the many paper authors and proposal contributors for the various technical and program components. We thank the large number of volunteers, including the Organizing Committee members and Technical Program Committee members who worked very hard to create this year’s outstanding conference. Every aspect of the conference was also aided by local committee members and by the hard work of Grupo Pacifico, to whom we are very grateful. We thank also ACM staff and Sheridan Printing Company for their constant support. This success was clearly due to the integration of their efforts.

Appendix A: ACM MULTIMEDIA 2013 CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION

General Co-Chairs  Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes (Yahoo Labs, Spain) Nicu Sebe (University of Trento, Italy) Nozha Boujemaa (INRIA, France) Technical Program Co-Chairs Daniel Gatica-Perez (IDIAP & EPFL, Switzerland) David A. Shamma (Yahoo Labs, USA) Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Roger Zimmermann (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Author’s Advocate Pablo Cesar (CWI, The Netherlands) Multimedia Grand Challenge Co-Chairs Yiannis Kompatsiaris (CERTH, Greece) Neil O’Hare (Yahoo Labs, Spain) Interactive Arts Co-Chairs Antonio Camurri (University of Genova, Italy) Marc Cavazza (Teesside University, UK) Local Arrangement Chair Mari-Carmen Marcos (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain) Sponsorship Chairs Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo Labs, Spain) Bernard Merialdo (Eurecom, France) Panel Co-Chairs  Yong Rui (Microsoft, China) Winston Hsu (National Tawain University, Taiwan) Michael Lew (University of Leiden, The Netherlands) Video Program Chairs Alexis Joly (INRIA, France) Giovanni Maria Farinella (University of Catania, Italy) Julien Champ (INRIA/LIRMM, France) Brave New Ideas Co-Chairs Jiebo Luo (University of Rochester, USA) Shuicheng Yan (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Doctorial Symposium Chairs Hayley Hung (Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands) Marco Cristani (University of Verona, Italy) Open Source Competition Chairs Ioannis (Yiannis) Patras (Queen Mary University, UK) Andrea Vedaldi (Oxford University, UK) Tutorial Co-Chairs Kiyoharu Aizawa (University of Tokyo, Japan) Lexing Xie (Australian National University, Australia) Workshop Co-Chairs Maja Pantic (Imperial College, UK ) Vladimir Pavlovic (Rutgers University, USA) Student Travel Grants Co-Chairs Ramanathan Subramanian (ADSC, Singapore) Jasper Uijlings (University of Trento, Italy) Publicity Co-Chairs Marco Bertini (University of Florence, Italy) Ichiro Ide (Nagoya University, Japan) Technical Demo Co-Chairs  Yi Yang (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Xavier Anguera (Telefonica Research, Spain) Proceedings Co-Chairs  Bogdan Ionescu (University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania) Qi Tian (University of Texas San Antonio, USA) Web Chair Michele Trevisol (Web Research Group UPF & Yahoo Labs, Spain)

Appendix B. ACM MM 2012 Sponsors & Supporters