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Call for Nominations: ACM TOMCCAP Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award

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The Editor-in-Chief of ACM TOMCCAP invites you to nominate candidates for the “ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award”.

The award is given annually to the author(s) of an outstanding paper published in ACM TOMCCAP within the previous legal year from January 1 until December 31. The award carries a plaque as well as travel funds to the ACM MM conference where the awardee(s) will be honored.

Procedure

Nominations for the award must include the following:
– A statement describing the technical contributions of the nominated paper and a description of the significance of the paper. The statement should not exceed 500 words. No self-nomination is accepted.
– Two additional supporting statements by recognized experts in the field regarding the technical contribution of the paper and its significance to the respective field.

Only papers published in regular issues (no Special Issues) can be nominated.

Nominations will be reviewed by the Selection Committee and the winning paper will finally be voted by the TOMCCAP Editorial Board.

Deadline

Deadline for nominations of papers published in 2012 (Volume 8) is the 15th of June 2013.

Contact

Please send your nominations to the Editor-in-Chief at steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de
If you have questions, please contact the TOMCCAP information director at TOMCCAP@kom.tu-darmstadt.de

Further details can be found at http://tomccap.acm.org/

Call for TOMCCAP Special Issue Proposals

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ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM – TOMCCAP)

Deadline for Proposal Submission: May, 1st 2013

Notification: June, 1st 2013

http://tomccap.acm.org/

ACM – TOMCCAP is one of the world’s leading journals on multimedia. As in previous years we are planning to publish a special issue in 2014. Proposals are accepted until May, 1st 2013. Each special issue is the responsibility of guest editors. If you wish to guest edit a special issue you should prepare a proposal as outlined below, then send this via e-mail to EiC Ralf Steinmetz(steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)

Proposals should:

  • Cover a current or emerging topic in the area of multimedia
    computing, communications and applications;
  • Set out the importance of the special issue’s topic in that area;
  • Give a strategy for the recruitment of high quality papers;
  • Indicate a draft time-scale in which the special issue could be
    produced (paper writing, reviewing, and submission of final copies
    to TOMCCAP), assuming the proposal is accepted.

As in the previous years, the special issue will be published as online-only issue in the ACM Digital Library. This gives the guest editors higher flexibility in the review process and the number of papers to be accepted, while yet ensuring a timely publication.A notification of acceptance for the proposals will be given until June, 1st 2013. Once a proposal is accepted we will contact you to discuss the further process.

For questions please contact:

Ralf Steinmetz – Editor in Chief (steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)
Sebastian Schmidt – Information Director (TOMCCAP@kom.tu-darmstadt.de)

SIGMM Education Column

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SIGMM Education Column of this issue highlights a new book, titled “Visual Information Retrieval using Java and LIRE,” which gives an introduction to the fields of information retrieval and visual information retrieval and points out selected methods, as well as their use and implementation within Java and more specifically LIRE, a Java CBIR library. The book is authored by Dr. Mathias Lux, from Klagenfurt University, Austria, and Prof. Oge Marques, of Florida Atlantic University, and it is published in the Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services by Morgan & Claypool.

 

The basic motivation for writing this book was the need for a fundamental course book that contained just the necessary knowledge to get students started with content-based image retrieval. The book is based on lectures given by the authors over the last years and has been designed to fulfill that need. It will also provide developers for content-based image solutions with a head start by explaining the most relevant concepts and practical requirements.

 

The book begins with a short introduction, followed by explanations of information retrieval and retrieval evaluation. Visual features are then explained, and practical problems and common solutions are outlined. Indexing strategies of visual features, including linear search, nearest neighbor search, hashing and bag of visual words, are discussed next, and the use of these strategies with LIRE is shown. Finally, LIRE is described in detail, to allow for employment of the library in various contexts and for extension of the functions provided.

 

There is also a companion website for the book (http://www.lire-project.net), which gives pointers to additional resources and will be updated with slides, figures, teaching materials and code samples.

 

Interview with ACM Fellow and SIGMM Chair Prof Klara Nahrstedt

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Prof. Dr. Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Chair

SIGMM Editor: “Why do societies such as ACM offer Fellows status to some of its members?”

Prof Klara Nahrstedt: The ACM society celebrates through its ACM Fellows Status Program the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. These individuals have helped to enlighten researchers, developers, practitioners and end-users of computing and information technology throughout the world. The new ACM Fellows join a distinguished list of colleagues to whom ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership in computing and information technology.

SIGMM Editor: “What is the significance for you as an individual research in becoming an ACM Fellow?”

Prof Klara Nahrstedt: Receiving the ACM Fellow Status represents a great honor for me due to the high distinction of this award in the computing community.  The ACM Fellow award recognizes  my own research in the area of “Quality of Service (QoS) management  for distributed multimedia systems”, as well as the joint work in this area with my students and colleagues at my home institution, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and other institutions, research labs, and companies with whom I have collaborated over the years.  Furthermore, becoming an ACM Fellow allows me to continue and push new ideas of QoS in distributed multimedia systems in three societal domains, the trustworthy cyber-physical infrastructure for smart grid environments, the collaborative immersive spaces in tele-health-care, and robust mobile multimedia systems in airline-airplane maintenance ecosystem.
SIGMM Editor: “How is this recognition perceived by your research students, department, and University? “

Prof Klara Nahrstedt: My research students, department and university are delighted that I have received the ACM Fellow status since this type of award very much reflects the high quality of students that get admitted to our department and I work with, colleagues I interact with, and resources I get provided by the department and university.

SIGMM Editor: “You have been one of the important torch bearers of the SIGMM community. What does this recognition imply for the SIGMM Community?”

Prof Klara Nahrstedt: SIGMM community is a relatively young community, having only recently celebrated 20 years of its existence. However, as the multimedia community is maturing, it is important for our community to promote its outstanding researchers and assist them towards the ACM Fellow status.  Furthermore, multimedia technology is becoming ubiquitous in all facets of our lives; hence it is of great importance that SIGMM leaders, especially its ACM Fellows, are at the table with other computing researchers to guide and drive future directions in computing and information technologies.

SIGMM Editor: “How will this recognition influence the SIGMM community?”

Prof Klara Nahrstedt: I hope that my ACM Fellow status recognition will influence the SIGMM community at least in three directions: (1) it will motivate young researchers in academia and industry to work towards high impact research accomplishments in multimedia area that will lead to the ACM Fellow status at the later stage of their careers, (2) it will impact female researchers to strive towards recognition of their work through the ACM Fellow Status, and (3) it will increase the distinguished group of ACM Fellows within the SIGMM, which again will be able to promote the next generation of multimedia researchers to join the ACM Fellows ranks.

 

MPEG Column: 103rd MPEG Meeting

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— original post by Multimedia Communication blog, Christian Timmerer, AAU

 

The 103rd MPEG Meeting

The 103rd MPEG meeting was held in Geneva, Switzerland, January 21-15, 2013. The official press release can be found here (doc only) and I’d like to introduce the new MPEG-H standard (ISO/IEC 23008) referred to as high efficiency coding and media delivery in heterogeneous environments:

  • Part 1: MPEG Media Transport (MMT) – status: 2nd committee draft (CD)
  • Part 2: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) – status: final draft international standard (FDIS)
  • Part 3: 3D Audio – status: call for proposals (CfP)

MPEG Media Transport (MMT)

The MMT project was started in order to address the needs of modern media transport applications going beyond the capabilities offered by existing means of transportation such as formats defined by MPEG-2 transport stream (M2TS) or ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) group of standards. The committee draft was approved during the 101st MPEG meeting. As a response to the CD ballot, MPEG received more than 200 comments from national bodies and, thus, decided to issue the 2nd committee draft which will be publicly available by February 7, 2013.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) – ITU-T H.265 | MPEG HEVC

HEVC is the next generation video coding standard jointly developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of ITU-T WP 3/16. Please note that both ITU-T and ISO/IEC MPEG use the term “high efficiency video coding” in the the title of the standard but one can expect – as with its predecessor – that the former will use ITU-T H.265 and the latter will use MPEG-H HEVC for promoting its standards. If you don’t want to participate in this debate, simply use high efficiency video coding.

The MPEG press release says that the “HEVC standard reduces by half the bit rate needed to deliver high-quality video for a broad variety of applications” (note: compared to its predecessor AVC). The editing period for the FDIS goes until March 3, 2013 and then with the final preparations and a 2 month balloting period (yes|no vote only) once can expect the International Standard (IS) to be available early summer 2013. Please note that there are no technical differences between FDIS and IS.

The ITU-T press release describes HEVC as a standard that “will provide a flexible, reliable and robust solution, future-proofed to support the next decade of video. The new standard is designed to take account of advancing screen resolutions and is expected to be phased in as high-end products and services outgrow the limits of current network and display technology.”

HEVC currently defines three profiles:

  • Main Profile for the “Mass-market consumer video products that historically require only 8 bits of precision”.
  • Main 10 Profile “will support up to 10 bits of processing precision for applications with higher quality demands”.
  • Main Still Picture Profile to support still image applications, hence, “HEVC also advances the state-of-the-art for still picture coding”

3D Audio

The 3D audio standard shall complement MMT and HEVC assuming that in a “home theater” system a large number of loudspeakers will be deployed. Therefore, MPEG has issued a Call for Proposals (CfP) with the selection of the reference model v0 due in July 2013. The CfP says that MPEG-H 3D Audio “might be surrounding the user and be situated at high, mid and low vertical positions relative to the user’s ears. The desired sense of audio envelopment includes both immersive 3D audio, in the sense of being able to virtualize sound sources at any position in space, and accurate audio localization, in terms of both direction and distance.”

“In addition to a “home theater” audio-visual system, there may be a “personal” system having a tablet-sized visual display with speakers built into the device, e.g. around the perimeter of the display. Alternatively, the personal device may be a hand-held smart phone. Headphones with appropriate spatialization would also be a means to deliver an immersive audio experience for all systems.”

Complementary to the CfP, MPEG also provided the encoder input format for MPEG-H 3D audio and a draft MPEG audio core experiment methodology for 3D audio work.

Publicly available MPEG output documents

The following documents shall be come available at http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/ (note: some may have an editing period – YY/MM/DD). If you have difficulties to access one of these documents, please feel free to contact me.

  • Study text of DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (13/01/25)
  • Study text of DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (13/02/25)
  • Text of ISO/IEC FDIS 23005-1 2nd edition Architecture (13/01/25)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 2nd CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (13/02/07)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM1 Range Extensions (13/03/22)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23008-2:201x/PDAM2 Multiview Extensions (13/03/22)
  • Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (13/01/25)
  • Encoder Input Format for MPEG-H 3D Audio (13/02/08)
  • Draft MPEG Audio CE methodology for 3D Audio work (13/01/25)
  • Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (13/02/08)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on MPEG User Descriptions (13/01/25)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on Green MPEG (13/01/25)
  • Context, Objectives, Use Cases and Requirements for Green MPEG (13/01/25)
  • White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (13/01/28)
  • MPEG Awareness Event Flyer at 104th MPEG meeting in Incheon (13/02/28)

Open Source Column: GPAC

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GPAC, Toolbox for Interactive Multimedia Packaging, Delivery and Playback

Introduction

GPAC was born 10 years ago from the need of a lighter and more robust implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard [1], compared to the official reference software. It has since then evolved into a much wider project, covering many tools required when exploring new research topics in multimedia, while keeping a strong focus on international standard coming from organization such as W3C, ISO, ETSI or IETF. The goal of the project is to provide the tools needed to setup test beds and experiments for interactive multimedia applications, in any of the various environments used to deliver content in modern systems: broadcast, multicast, unicast unreliable streaming, HTTP-based streaming and file-based delivery. Read more →

MPEG Column: 102nd MPEG Meeting

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— original post by Multimedia Communication blog, Christian Timmerer, AAU

The 102nd MPEG meeting was held in Shanghai, China, October 15-19, 2012. The official press release can be found here (not yet available) and I would like to highlight the following topics:

  • Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS
  • MPEG-4 has now 30 parts: Let’s welcome timed text and other visual overlays
  • Draft call for proposals for 3D audio
  • Green MPEG is progressing
  • MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

Augmented Reality Application Format (ARAF) goes DIS

MPEG’s application format dealing with augmented reality reached DIS status and is only one step away from becoming in international standard. In a nutshell, the MPEG ARAF enables to augment 2D/3D regions of scene by combining multiple/existing standards within a specific application format addressing certain industry needs. In particular, ARAF comprises three components referred to as scene, sensor/actuator, and media. The scene component is represented using a subset of MPEG-4 Part 11 (BIFS), the sensor/actuator component is defined within MPEG-V, and the media component may comprise various type of compressed (multi)media assets using different sorts of modalities and codecs.

A tutorial from Marius Preda, MPEG 3DG chair, at the Web3D conference in August 2012 is provided below.

MPEG-4 has now 30 parts

Let’s welcome timed text and other visual overlays in the family of MPEG-4 standards. Part 30 of MPEG-4 – in combination with an amendment to the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF) –  addresses the carriage of W3C TTML including its derivative SMPTE Timed Text, as well as WebVTT. The types of overlays include subtitles, captions, and other timed text and graphics. The text-based overlays include basic text and XML-based text. Additionally, the standards provides support for bitmaps, fonts, and other graphics formats such as scalable vector graphics.

Draft call for proposals for 3D audio

MPEG 3D audio is concerned about various test items ranging from 9.1 over 12.1 up to 22.1 channel configurations. A public draft call for proposals has been issued at this meeting with the goal to finalize the call and the evaluation guidelines at the next meeting. The evaluation will be conducted in two phases. Phase one for higher bitrates (1.5 Mbps to 265 kbps) is foreseen to conclude in July 2013 with the evaluation of the answers to the call and the selection of the “Reference Model 0 (RM0)” technology which will serve as a basis for the development of an 3D audio standard. The second phase targets lower bitrates (96 kbps to 48 kbps) and builds on RM0 technology after this has been documented using text and code.

Green MPEG is progressing

The idea between green MPEG is to define signaling means that enable energy efficient encoding, delivery, decoding, and/or presentation of MPEG formats (and possibly others) without the loss of Quality of Experience. Green MPEG will address this issue from an end-to-end point of view with the focus – as usual – on the decoder. However, a codec-centric design is not desirable as the energy efficiency should not be affected at the expenses of the other components of the media ecosystem. At the moment, first requirements have been defined and everyone is free to join the discussions on the email reflector within the Ad-hoc Group.

MPEG starts a new publicity campaign by making more working documents publicly available for free

As a response to national bodies comments, MPEG is starting from now on to make more documents publicly available for free. Here’s a selection of these documents which are publicly available here. Note that some may have an editing period and, thus, are not available at the of writing this blog post.

  • Text of ISO/IEC 14496-15:2010/DAM 2 Carriage of HEVC (2012/11/02)
  • Text of ISO/IEC CD 14496-30 Timed Text and Other Visual Overlays in ISO Base Media File Format (2012/11/02)
  • DIS of ISO/IEC 23000-13, Augmented Reality Application Format (2012/11/07)
  • DTR of ISO/IEC 23000-14, Augmented reality reference model (2012/11/21)
  • Study of ISO/IEC CD 23008-1 MPEG Media Transport (2012/11/12)
  • High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Test Model 9 (HM 9) Encoder Description (2012/11/30)
  • Study Text of ISO/IEC DIS 23008-2 High Efficiency Video Coding (2012/11/30)
  • Working Draft of HEVC Full Range Extensions (2012/11/02)
  • Working Draft of HEVC Conformance (2012/11/02)
  • Report of Results of the Joint Call for Proposals on Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) (2012/11/09)
  • Draft Call for Proposals on 3D Audio (2012/10/19)
  • Text of ISO/IEC 23009-1:2012 DAM 1 Support for Event Messages and Extended Audio Channel Configuration (2012/10/31)
  • Internet Video Coding Test Model (ITM) v 3.0 (2012/11/02)
  • Draft Requirements on MPEG User Descriptions (2012/10/19)
  • Draft Use Cases for MPEG User Description (Ver. 4.0) (2012/10/19)
  • Requirements on Green MPEG (2012/10/19)
  • White Paper on State of the Art in compression and transmission of 3D Video (Draft) (2012/10/19)
  • White Paper on Compact Descriptors for Visual Search (2012/11/09)

MPEG Column: 101st MPEG Meeting

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MPEG news: a report from the 101st meeting, Stockholm, Sweden

The 101st MPEG meeting in Sweden

The 101st MPEG meeting was held in Stockholm, Sweden, July 16-20, 2012. The official press release can be found here and I would like to highlight the following topics:

  • MPEG Media Transport (MMT) reaches Committee Draft (CD)
  • High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reaches Draft International Standard (DIS)
  • MPEG and ITU-T establish JCT-3V
  • Call for Proposals: HEVC scalability extensions
  • 3D audio workshop
  • Green MPEG

MMT goes CD

The Committee Draft (CD) of MPEG-H part 1 referred to as MPEG Media Transport (MMT) has been approved and will be publicly available after an editing period which will end Sep 17th. MMT comprises the following features:

  • Delivery of coded media by concurrently using more than one delivery medium (e.g., as it is the case of heterogeneous networks).
  • Logical packaging structure and composition information to support multimedia mash-ups (e.g., multiscreen presentation).
  • Seamless and easy conversion between storage and delivery formats.
  • Cross layer interface to facilitate communication between the application layers and underlying delivery layers.
  • Signaling of messages to manage the presentation and optimized delivery of media.

This list of ‘features’ may sound very high-level but as the CD usually comprises stable technology and is publicly available, the research community is more than welcome to evaluate MPEG’s new way of media transport. Having said this, I would like to refer to the Call for Papers of  JSAC’s special issue on adaptive media streaming which is mainly focusing on DASH but investigating its relationship to MMT is definitely within the scope.

HEVCs’ next step towards completion: DIS

The approval of the Draft International Standard (DIS) brought the HEVC standard one step closer to completion. As reported previously, HEVC shows inferior performance gains compared to its predecessor and real-time software decoding on the iPad 3 (720p, 30Hz, 1.5 Mbps) has been demonstrated during the Friday plenary [1, 2]. It is expected that the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) is going to be approved at the 103rd MPEG meeting in January 21-25, 2013. If the market need for HEVC is only similar as it was when AVC was finally approved, I am wondering if one can expect first products by mid/end 2013. From a research point of view we know – and history is our witness – that improvements are still possible even if the standard has been approved some time ago. For example, the AVC standard is now available in its 7th edition as a consolidation of various amendments and corrigenda.

JCT-3V

After the Joint Video Team (JVT) which successfully developed standards such as AVC, SVC, MVC and the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), MPEG and ITU-T establish the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video coding extension development (JCT-3V). That is, from now on MPEG and ITU-T also joins forces in developing 3D video coding extensions for existing codecs as well as the ones under development (i.e., AVC, HEVC). The current standardization plan includes the development of AVC multi-view extensions with depth to be completed this year and I assume HEVC will be extended with 3D capabilities once the 2D version is available.

In this context it is interesting that a call for proposals for MPEG Frame Compatible (MFC) has been issued to address current deployment issues of stereoscopic videos. The requirements are available here.

Call for Proposals: SVC for HEVC

In order to address the need for higher resolutions – Ultra HDTV – and subsets thereof, JCT-VC issued a call for proposals for HEVC scalability extensions. Similar to AVC/SVC, the requirements include that the base layer should be compatible with HEVC and enhancement layers may include temporal, spatial, and fidelity scalability. The actual call, the use cases, and the requirements shall become available on the MPEG Web site.

MPEG hosts 3D Audio Workshop

Part 3 of MPEG-H will be dedicated to audio, specifically 3D audio. The call for proposals will be issues at the 102nd MPEG meeting in October 2012 and submissions will be due at the 104th meeting in April 2013. At this meeting, MPEG has hosted a 2nd workshop on 3D audio with the following speakers.

  • Frank Melchior, BBC R&D: “3D Audio? – Be inspired by the Audience!”
  • Kaoru Watanabe, NHK and ITU: “Advanced multichannel audio activity and requirements”
  • Bert Van Daele, Auro Technologies: “3D audio content production, post production and distribution and release”
  • Michael Kelly, DTS: “3D audio, objects and interactivity in games”

The report of this workshop including the presentations will be publicly available by end of August at the MPEG Web site.

What’s new: Green MPEG

Impressions from the 101st meeting

Finally, MPEG is starting to explore a new area which is currently referred to as Green MPEG addressing technologies to enable energy-efficient use of MPEG standards. Therefore, an Ad-hoc Group (AhG) was established with the following mandates:

  1. Study the requirements and use-cases for energy efficient use of MPEG technology.
  2. Solicit further evidence for the energy savings.
  3. Develop reference software for Green MPEG experimentation and upload any such software to the SVN.
  4. Survey possible solutions for energy-efficient video processing and presentation.
  5. Explore the relationship between metadata types and coding technologies.
  6. Identify new metadata that will enable additional power savings.
  7. Study system-wide interactions and implications of energy-efficient processing on mobile devices.

AhGs are usually open to the public and all discussions take place via email. To subscribe please feel free to join the email reflector.

ACM TOMCCAP Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award

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In its initial year the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award goes to the paper Video Quality for Face Detection, Recognition and Tracking (TOMCCAP vol 7. no.3) by Pavel Korshunov and Wei Tsang Ooi.

The winning paper is pioneering because it is the very first study which tries to determine an objective quality threshold value for videos used in automated video processing (AVP). The

paper proves that if a video’s quality is below a certain threshold (it gives the actual values for this threshold based on video context), it cannot be used in AVP systems. Further, it is shown that

AVP systems still work with reasonable accuracy even when the video quality is low from a human’s perspective. This is an important finding because it means we can reduce quality and bit rate of the video without sacrificing accuracy, leading to reduced costs, greater scalability, and faster processing. What is unique about the paper is that it distinguishes between quality as perceived by humans, versus quality as perceived by AVP systems. In essence, the paper proposes that for AVP systems we should design machine-consumable video coding standards, not human-consumable codes.

The purpose of the award is to recognize the most significant work in ACM TOMCCAP in a given calendar year. The whole readership of ACM TOMCCAP was invited to nominate articles which were published in Volume 7 (2011). Based on the nominations the winner has been chosen by the TOMCCAP Editorial Board. The main assessment criteria have been quality, novelty, timeliness, clarity of presentation, in addition to relevance to multimedia computing, communications, and applications.

The award honors the founding Editor-in-Chief of TOMCCAP, Nicolas D. Georganas, for his contributions to the field of multimedia computing and his significant contributions to ACM.  He influenced the research and the multimedia community exceedingly.

The Editor-in-Chief Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Steinmetz and the Editorial Board of ACM TOMCCAP cordially congratulate the winner. The award will be presented to the authors on November 1st 2012 at the ACM Multimedia 2012 in Nara, Japan and includes  travel expenses for the winning authors.

Editorial

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Dear Member of the SIGMM Community, welcome to the third issue of the SIGMM Records in 2012.

As you can see, the format of the Records as changed dramatically with this issue, and the migration is going to be completed in the coming months. The new system is meant to make the Records more valuable and interactive for your benefit, and we hope the long wait for the third issue was worth your while. First of all, your submissions will become visible on the front page of the Records as soon as they have been approved by one of the editors, and they will be included in the following issue. The submission of standard content formats has become much easier than before: select your contribution from the pulld0wn menu, add your information and submit it, and see immediately on the submission page that your submission was successful. You can of course also send your contributions and any questions to enews-contributions@sigmm.org.

We are furthermore inviting a new category: Please tell us about your ongoing research projects! What are your goals and achievements? Who are your partners? How are your publications connected?

Of course, this issue has also some content: SIGMM’s 2012 awards have been handed out at ACM Multimedia in October in Nara. In this issue you can read about the SIGMM award for outstanding contributions to multimedia, the best PhD thesis award 2012 and the first ever awarded Nicholas D. Georganas Award for the best TOMCCAP paper.

TOMCCAP announces a major policy chang; you can read about the startup foodQuest, the Open Source project Ambulant, and the latest MPEG meeting.  You can read PhD thesis summaries provided by a two candidates who have recently passed their doctoral exams.

Last but most certainly not least, you find pointers to the latest issues of TOMCCAP and MMSJ, and several job announcements.

We hope that you enjoy this issue of the Records.

The Editors
Stephan Kopf
Viktor Wendel
Lei Zhang
Pradeep Atrey
Christian Timmerer
Pablo Cesar
Carsten Griwodz