This column showcases a series of video interviews shooted at ACM Multimedia 2022. Social media editors in chief (i.e., Silvia Rossi and Conor Keighrey) of the records interviewed the authors behind some of the most intriguing and compelling demos and artistic interactive artworks. Silvia and Conor have started this initiative and will continue, when possible, at conferences supported by SIGMM.
ACM Multimedia is the premier international conference in the area of multimedia within the field of computer science. As in every edition of ACM MM, the conference once again played host to riveting demonstrations and interactive showcases of the latest research concepts. These sessions serve a dual purpose: they stand as a testament to the presenters’ invaluable scientific and engineering contributions while also providing a unique opportunity for multimedia researchers and practitioners to delve into real-world applications, prototypes, and proofs-of-concept.
This dynamic setting is where conference attendees come face-to-face with groundbreaking multimedia systems. It’s a chance for them to gain insights into the innovative solutions and ideas that are actively shaping the future of this ever-evolving field. From visionary demonstrations of emerging technologies to interactive showcases that push the boundaries of creativity, these sessions are at the heart of what makes ACM MM a unique event in the world of multimedia.
Below is the list of video interviews with references to the corresponding authors and papers.
Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola. 2022. Dream Painter: An Interactive Art Installation Bridging Audience Interaction, Robotics, and Creative AI. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 7235–7236. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3549976
Jorge Forero, Gilberto Bernardes, and Mónica Mendes. 2022. Emotional Machines: Toward Affective Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 7237–7238. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3549973
Ignacio Reimat, Yanni Mei, Evangelos Alexiou, Jack Jansen, Jie Li, Shishir Subramanyam, Irene Viola, Johan Oomen, and Pablo Cesar. 2022. Mediascape XR: A Cultural Heritage Experience in Social VR. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6955–6957. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3547732
Manuel Silva, Luana Santos, Luís Teixeira, and José Vasco Carvalho. 2022. All is Noise: In Search of Enlightenment, a VR Experience. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 7223–7224. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3549958
Pin-Xuan Liu, Tse-Yu Pan, Hsin-Shih Lin, Hung-Kuo Chu, and Min-Chun Hu. 2022. BetterSight: Immersive Vision Training for Basketball Players. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6979–6981. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3547745
Tiago Fornelos, Pedro Valente, Rafael Ferreira, Diogo Tavares, Diogo Silva, David Semedo, Joao Magalhaes, and Nuno Correia. 2022. A Conversational Shopping Assistant for Online Virtual Stores. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6994–6996. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3547738
Ting-Yang Kao, Tse-Yu Pan, Chen-Ni Chen, Tsung-Hsun Tsai, Hung-Kuo Chu, and Min-Chun Hu. 2022. ScoreActuary: Hoop-Centric Trajectory-Aware Network for Fine-Grained Basketball Shot Analysis. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6991–6993. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3547736
Maria Giovanna Donadio, Filippo Principi, Andrea Ferracani, Marco Bertini, and Alberto Del Bimbo. 2022. Engaging Museum Visitors with Gamification of Body and Facial Expressions. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 7000–7002. https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3547744
The 14th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (with the associated workshops: NOSSDAV 2023, MMVE 2023, and the first edition of GMSys 2023) took place from 7th – 10th June 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. The MMSys conference brings together researchers in multimedia systems to showcase and exchange their cutting-edge research findings. Once again, there were technical talks spanning various multimedia domains and inspiring keynote presentations. Participants had also the opportunity to further interact with colleagues while enjoying the sunset with a 360° view of Vancouver on the Lookout tower or during a dinner in the core of the rainforest. Additionally, this year’s event included a special session dedicated to the memory of Dr. Kuan-Ta Chen, to honor his invaluable contributions to the multimedia community and to inspire the future generation of researches.
To encourage junior researchers to participate on-site, SIGMM has sponsored a group of students with Student Travel Grant Awards. For many of them, this was their first time presenting at an international conference, and it was a wonderful experience. In this article, the recipients of the travel grants share their experiences at MMSys 2023.
Mike Vandersanden, PhD student from Hasselt University, Belgium
As a new PhD student starting my professional academic career less than a year before MMSys ’23, I focused on finding my place in the academic community. My advisor and colleagues encouraged me to achieve two goals: get feedback on my research and build a network. I submitted my first paper and it got accepted for the Doctoral Symposium at the conference, which was a great opportunity to work towards achieving my goals. Presenting my paper allowed me to receive helpful feedback, have interesting discussions, and gain new perspectives. It was motivating to see people interested in my work. During the rest of the conference, I connected with many attendees from different parts of the world. The social events were a great way to meet others, and we also had enjoyable evenings downtown. Upon returning home, I was happy to report to my advisor that I accomplished all my goals for the first year. I am grateful for receiving a student travel grant, as it made it easier to travel to another continent. It also gave me the freedom to manage my budget and increases my chances of attending the conference again next year.
May Lim, PhD student from National University of Singapore, Singapore
I was both excited and nervous for MMSys 2023 as it was not only my first in-person conference but also in a country I had never visited before. The conference turned out to be one of the most unforgettable and pleasant experience I ever had. It was well-organized with very insightful presentations, many opportunities to interact and exchange contacts with fellow researchers, and not forgetting the organizers’ thoughtful efforts to ensure the great comfort and welfare of the participants. Vancouver’s weather and people were very kind as well.
I am thankful for the travel grant and the support from ACM SIGMM was truly heartening. I hope to continue to be part of this community and pay it forward in other ways.
Tiago Soares da Costa, PhD student from FEUP, Portugal
MMSys 2023 marked my return to in-person conferences and was one of the most well organized conferences I had the pleasure to participate in. After several virtual conferences, being able to actively meet and discuss interesting topics related to multimedia with fellow researchers was a breath of fresh air. The keynote presentation from Klara Nahrstedt was one of my highlights from MMSys 2023, due to its extensive focus on multi-view streaming, one of the main topics from my PhD research. Ihab Amer was another welcome surprise, presenting us with the current trends in AI encoding from one of the leading tech enterprises, AMD. Regarding paper presentations, I have to highlight the following works: 1) “The AD△ER Framework: Tools for Event Video Representations“, for providing us with a new approach to frameless videos; 2) “Remote Expert Assistance System for Mixed-HMD Clients over 5G Infrastructure” for delivering an impressive tech demonstration; 3) “FleXR: A System Enabling Flexibly Distributed Extended Reality“, for presenting us with a distributed stream processing solution which can be effectively applied to XR-based environments. As for the social events from MMSys 2023, the sights and sounds from Grouse Mountain and the impressive view from the Vancouver Lookout Tower were among some of my favourite moments in Vancouver, that I will forever cherish. Overall, MMSys 2023 was an amazing conference and I’m particularly grateful to the SIGMM committee for providing me with the travel grant.
Yu-Szu Wei from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
It is a great honor for me to receive the student travel grant and I appreciate it so much. ACM MMsys 2023 is my first in-person experience attending an international conference, it certainly is a fantastic experience for me. I met lots of astonishing researchers and volunteers who solve problems with different, creative, and novel approaches. I exchanged my ideas with them and learned a lot from them. The keynote sessions also gave me brand-new mindsets, finding out that there are lots of issues for us to investigate and deal with. The most impressive thing for me is to stand on the stage and present my work to those experts. I’m so proud of myself for delivering my research ideas in front of the public and gaining abundant feedback from the audience.
Thanks to the committee that organized this awesome event, and provided me the travel grant to attend the conference. I’m looking forward to attending ACM MMSys again in the future.
ACM Multimedia 2022 was held in a hybrid format in Lisbon, Portugal from October 10-14, 2022.
This was the first local participation in three years for many participants, as the strict travel restrictions associated with Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021 made it difficult to participate locally by travelling out of the host and neighbouring countries.
In Portugal, the Covid-19 restrictions were almost lifted, and the city was bustling with tourists. Participants were careful to avoid infectious diseases and enjoyed Lisbon’s local wine “Vinho Verde” and cod dishes with their colleagues and engaged in lively discussions about multimedia research.
For many students, this was their first time presenting at an international conference, and it was a wonderful experience.
To encourage student authors to participate on-site, SIGMM has sponsored a group of students with Student Travel Grant Awards. Students who wanted to apply for this travel grant needed to submit an online form before the submission deadline. The selected students received either 1,000 or 2,000 USD to cover their airline tickets as well as accommodation costs for this event. Of the recipients, 25 were able to attend the conference. We asked them to share their unique experience attending ACM Multimedia 2022. In this article, we share their reports of the event.
Xiangming Gu, PhD student, National University of Singapore, Singapore
It is a great honour to receive a SIGMM Student Grant. ACM Multimedia 2022 is my first time attending an academic conference physically. During the conference, I presented my oral paper “MM-ALT: Multimodal Automatic Lyric Transcription”, which was also selected as “Top Rated Papers”. Besides the presentation, I also met a lot of people who shared similar research interests. It was very inspiring to learn from others’ papers and discuss them with the authors directly. Moreover, I was also a volunteer for ACM Multimedia 2022 and attended the session of the 5th International ACM Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports. During the session, I learnt how to organize a workshop, which was a great exercise for me. Now, after I come back to Singapore, I still miss the conference. I wish I can get my paper accepted next year and attend the conference again.
Avinash Madasu, Computer Science Master’s student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA.
It is my absolute honour to receive the student travel grant for attending the ACM Multimedia 2022 conference. This is the first time I have attended a top AI conference in-person. I enjoyed it a lot during the conference and I was sad that the conference ended quickly. Within the conference days, I was able to attend a lot of oral sessions, keynote talks and poster sessions. I was able to interact with fellow researchers from both academia and industry. I learnt a lot about exciting research going on in my area of interest as well as other areas. It provided a new refreshing experience and I hope to bring this to my research. I presented a poster and felt happy when fellow researchers appreciated my work. Apart from technical details, I was able to forge a lot of new friendships which I truly cherish for my whole life.
Moreno La Quatra, PhD student, Politecnico di Torino
The ACM Multimedia 2022 conference was an amazing experience. After a few years of remote conferences, it was a pleasure to be able to attend the conference in person. I got the opportunity to meet many researchers of different seniorities and backgrounds, and I learned a lot from them. The poster sessions were one of the highlights of the conference. They were a very valuable opportunity to present interesting ideas and explore the details of other researchers’ work. I found the keynotes, presentations, and workshops to be very inspiring and engaging as well. Throughout them, I learned about specific topics and interacted with friendly, passionate researchers from around the world. I would like to thank the ACM Multimedia 2022 organization for the opportunity to attend the conference in Lisbon, all the other volunteers for their friendly and helpful attitude, and the SIGMM Student Travel Grant committee for the financial support.
Sheng-Ming Tang, Master student, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
My name is Sheng-Ming Tang from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. It is a great honour for me to receive the student travel grant. First, I want to thank the committee for organizing this fantastic event. As ACM MM 2022 is my first in-person experience presenting at a conference, I felt a little bit nervous in the first place. However, I started to get comfortable in the conference through the interaction of those astonishing researchers and the volunteers. It was great to not only present in front of the public but also participate in the events. I met a lot of people who solved problems with different and creative approaches, learned brand-new mindsets from the keynote sessions, and gained abundant feedback from the audience, which would boost my research. Thank the committee again for giving me this greatest opportunity to present and share my work in person. I enjoyed a lot during the event.
Tai-Chen Tsai, Graduate student, National Tsing Hua University Taiwan
First, I would like to thank ACM for providing a student travel grant that allowed me to attend the conference. This is my first time presenting my work at a conference. The conference I attended was the interactive art session. I was worried that the setup would be complicated abroad. However, as soon as I arrived at the site, volunteers assisted me with the installation. The conference provided complete hardware resources, allowing me to have a smooth and excellent exhibition experience. Also, I took the opportunity to see many interesting researchers from different countries. The work “Emotional Machines” in the interactive art exhibition surprised me. His system collects and combines what participants are saying and their current emotions. The data is transformed into 360-degree image content in the VR environment through the model so that everyone’s information forms a small universe in the VR environment. The idea is creative. Additionally, I can chat and discuss projects with published researchers while volunteering at workshops. They shared their lifestyle and work experiences as researchers in European countries, and we discussed what interesting study is and what is not. This is the best reward for me.
Bhalaji Nagarajan, PhD Student, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
ACM-Multimedia was the first big conference I was able to participate in person after two years of complete virtual participation. I presented my work both as oral and poster presentations at the Workshop on Multimedia-Assisted Dietary Management (MADiMa). It gave me an excellent opportunity to present my work and to get valuable input from reputed pioneers regarding the future scope. It gave me a new dimension and helped in expanding my technical skill set. This was also my first volunteering experience on such a massive scale. It gave me a great learning experience to see and learn how to manage conferences of such a large scale. I am very happy that I attended the conference in person. I was able to meet new people, and reputed pioneers in the field, learn new things and of course, made some new friends. A big thank you for the SIGMM Travel Grant that allowed me to attend the conference in-person in Lisbon.
Kiruthika Kannan, MS by Research, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.
My paper on “DrawMon: A Distributed System for Detection of Atypical Sketch Content in Concurrent Pictionary Games” was accepted at the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia. It was my first international conference, and I felt honoured to be able to present my research in front of experienced researchers. The conference also exhibited diverse research projects addressing fascinating scientific and technological problems. The poster sessions and talks at the conference improved my knowledge of the research trends in multimedia. In addition to this, I was able to interact with fellow researchers from diverse cultures. It was interesting to hear about their experiences and learn about their work at their institution. As a volunteer at the conference, I witnessed the hard work of the behind the scene organizers and volunteering team to smoothly run the events. I am grateful to the SIGMM Student Travel Grant for supporting my attendance at the ACMMM 22 conference.
Garima Sharma, PhD Student, Department of Human-Centred Computing, Monash University
It was a pleasure to receive a SIGMM travel grant and to attend the ACM Multimedia 2022 conference in person. ACM Multimedia is one of the top conferences in my research area and it was my first in-person conference during my PhD. I had a great experience interacting with numerous researchers and fellow PhD students. Along with all the interesting keynotes, I attended as many oral sessions as possible. Some of these sessions were aligned with my research work and some were outside of my work. This gave me a new research perspective at different levels. Also, working with organisers in a few sessions gave me a whole new experience in managing these events. Overall, I got many insightful comments, suggestions and feedback which motivated me with some interesting directions in my research work. I would like to thank the organisers for making this year’s ACM Multimedia a wonderful experience for every attendee.
Alon Harell, PhD student at the Multimedia Lab at Simon Fraser University
I had the pleasure to receive the SIGMM Student Travel Grant and to attend and volunteer at ACM Multimedia 22 in Lisbon, Portugal. The work I submitted to the conference was done outside of my regular PhD research, and thus without this grant, I would have not been able to participate. The workshop at which I presented, ACM MM Sport 22, was incredibly eye-opening with many fantastic papers, great presentations, and above all great people with which I was able to exchange ideas, form bonds, and perhaps even create future collaborations. The main conference, which coincides more closely with my main research on image and video coding for machines, was just as good. With fascinating talks, some in person, and some virtual, I was exposed to many new ideas (or perhaps just new to me) and learned a great deal. I was also able to benefit from the generosity and experience of Prof. Chong Wah Ngo from Singapore Management University, during my PhD. Mentor lunch, who shared with me his thoughts on pursuing a career in academia. Overall, ACM Multimedia 22 was an especially unique experience because it was the first in-person conference I was able to attend since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and being back face-to-face with fellow researchers was a great pleasure.
Lorenzo Vaiani, Ph.D. student (1st year), Politecnico di Torino, Italy
ACM MM 2022 was my first in-person conference. Being able to present my works and discuss them with other participants in person was an incredible experience. I enjoyed every activity, from presentations and posters to workshops and demos. I received excellent feedback and new inspiration to continue my research. The best part was definitely strengthening the bonds with friends I already knew and making more with the amazing people I met there. I learned a lot from all of them. Volunteer activities helped a lot in making these kinds of connections. Thanks to the organizers for this fantastic opportunity and the SIGMM Student Travel Grant committee for the financial support. This edition of ACM MM was just the first for me, but I hope for many more in the future.
Xiaoyu Lin, third-year PhD student at Inria Grenoble, France
It is a great honour to attend ACM MM 2022 in Lisbon. It was a great experience. I have met lots of nice professors and researchers. Discussing with them gave me lots of inspiration on both research directions and career development. I presented my work during the doctoral symposium. I’ve got plenty of useful feedback which can help me to improve our work. During the “Ask Me Anything” lunch, I have the chance to discuss with several senior researchers. They provide me with some kind and very useful advice on how to do research. Besides, I have also served as a volunteer for a workshop. It also helped me to meet other volunteers and made some new friends. Thanks to all the chairs and organizers who have worked hard to make ACM MM 2022 such a wonderful conference. It’s really an impressive experience!
I would like to thank the ACM Multimedia Committee provided me with the student travel grant so that I can attend the conference in person. ACM Multimedia is the worldwide top conference in the Multimedia field. It provides me with an opportunity to present my work and communicate with the researchers working on this topic of multimedia search. Besides, the excellent keynotes and passionate panel talk also picture a good vision of future research in the multimedia field. Overall, I must express that ACM MM22 is amazing and well-organized. I again appreciate the ACM MM committee for the student travel grant, which made my attendance possible.
Nitish Nagesh (@nitish_nagesh) is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department, the University of California, Irvine, USA. He has been awarded as Best Social Media Reporter of ACM Multimedia 2022 conference. To celebrate this award, Nitish Nagesh reported on his wonderful experience at ACM Multimedia 2022 as follows.
I was excited when our paper “World Food Atlas for Food Navigation” was accepted to the Multimedia Assisted Dietary Management Workshop (MADiMA). Being held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2022, the premier multimedia conference was the icing on the cake. It being in Lisbon, Portugal was the cherry on top of the cake. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. It is fitting to describe a multimedia conference experience report through pictures.
Prof. Ramesh Jain organized an informal meetup at the Choupana Caffe based on the advice of Joao Magalhaes, general chair of ACMMM 2022. It was great to meet researchers working on food computing including Prof. Yoko Yamakata, Prof. Agnieszka, Maija Kale. It was great to also have the company of students and professors from Singapore Management University including Prof. Chong Wah along with Prof. Phoebe Chen. Since this was the first in-person conference for many folks, we had great conversations over waffles, pear salad and watermelon mint juice!
The MADiMA workshop and the Cooking and Eating Activities (CEA) workshop had stellar keynote speakers and presentations about topics ranging from adherence to a mediterranean diet to mental health estimation through food images.
The workshop was at the Lisbon Congress Center. It was a treat to watch the sun shine brightly on the congress center in the morning and the mellow sunset only a few minutes away near the Tagus Estuary rendering an orangish hue to the red bridge overlooking the train tracks below.
After a great set of presentations, the MADIMA and CEA workshop was drawn to a close with a group picture, of one large family of people who love food and want to help people enjoy food while maintaining their health goals. A huge shout out to the workshop chairs Prof. Stavroula Mougiakakou, Prof. Keiji Yanai, Prof. Dario Allegra and Prof. Yoko Yamakata. (I tried my best to include a photo where everyone looks good!)
All work and no play makes us dull people! And all research with no food makes us hungry people! We had a post-workshop dinner at an authentic Portuguese restaurant. The food was great and it was a delightful evening because of the surprise treat from the professors!
Prof. Jain’s Ph.D. talk was inspiring as he shared his personal journey that led him to focus on healthcare. He urged students in the multimedia community to pursue multimodal healthcare research as he shared his insights on building a personal health navigator.
I had signed up to be a mentee for the Ph.D. school Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. We asked Prof. Ming Dong questions about his time at graduate school, balancing teaching and research responsibilities, tips on maximizing research output and strategies to cope with rejections. He was candid in his responses and emphasized the need to focus on incremental progress while striving to do impactful research. I must thank Prof. Wei Tsang and other organizers for their leadership in organizing a first-of-its-kind session.
In between running around oral sessions, poster presentations, keynote talks, networking, grabbing lunch, and enjoying Portuguese Tart, we managed to have fun while volunteering. Huge credit to the students and staff (the Rafael’s, the Diogo’s, the David’s, the Gustavo’s, the Pedro’s) from Nova university for doing the heavy lifting to ensure a smooth online, hybrid and in-person experience!
It was a pleasure to watch Prof. Alan Smeaton deliver an inspiring speech about the journey of information retrieval and multimedia. The community congratulates you once again on the Technical Achievement Award – more power to you, Alan!
The highlight of the conference was the grand banquet at Centro Cultural de Belém. There could not have been a better climax to the gala event than the Fado music. One aspect of Fado music symbolizes longing where the spouse sings a melancholy when her partner sets sail on long voyages. It is accompanied by the unique 12 string guitar and is sung very close to the audience to heighten the intimacy. I could fully relate to the artists’ melody and rhythms since I had been longing to see my family and friends back home, whom I have not visited for the past three years due to the pandemic. Another tune described the beauty of Lisbon in superlatives including the sun shining the brightest compared to any other part of the world. There was a happy ending to the tune when the artists recreated the moment of joy after the war was over and everyone was merry again. It reinvigorated a fresh hope and breathed a new lease of life into our cluttered worlds. For once, I was truly present in the moment!
The 13th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (and associated workshops: MMVE 2022, NOSSDAV 2022, GameSys 2022) happened from 14th – 17th June 2022 in Athlone, Ireland. The MMSys conference is an essential forum for researchers in multimedia systems to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. After two years of online and hybrid editions, MMSys was held onsite in the beautiful Athlone. Besides the many high-quality technical talks spread across different multimedia areas and the wonderful keynote talks, there were a few events targeted especially at students, such as mentoring sessions and the doctoral symposium. The social events were significant this year since they were the first opportunity in two years for multimedia researchers to meet colleagues, collaborators, and friends and discuss the latest hot topics while sharing a pint of Guinness or a glass of wine.
To encourage student authors to participate on-site, SIGMM has sponsored a group of students with Student Travel Grant Awards. Students who wanted to apply for this travel grant needed to submit an online form before the submission deadline. The selected students received either 1,000 or 2,000 USD to cover their airline tickets as well as accommodation costs for this event. Of the recipients, 11 were able to attend the conference. We asked them to share their unique experience attending MMSys’22. In this article, we share their reports of the event.
Andrea M. Storås, PhD student, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
I am grateful for receiving the SIGMM Student Travel Grant and getting the opportunity to participate at the MMSys’ 2022 Conference in Athlone, Ireland. During the conference, I presented my research as a part of the Doctoral Symposium and got valuable advice and mentoring from an experienced professor in the field of multimedia systems. The Doctoral Symposium was a great place for me to get experience with pitching my research and presenting posters at a scientific conference.
In addition to inspiring talks and demos, the conference was filled with social events. One of the highlights was the boat trip to the Glasson Lake House with barbeque afterwards. I found the conference useful for my future career as I got to meet brilliant researchers, connect with other PhD students and discuss topics related to my PhD. I really hope that I will get the opportunity to participate in future editions of MMSys.
Reza Farahani, PhD student, ITEC Dept., Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt, Austria
After two years of virtual attendance in ACM MMSys, I had the opportunity to be in Athlone, Ireland, and present our work in front of the community. Like previous years, I expected a well-organized conference, and I witnessed everything from keynotes to papers sessions was perfect. Moreover, the social events were one of the best experiences I achieved, where I could discuss with community members and learn many things in a friendly atmosphere. Overall, I must express that the MMSys 2022 was excellent in all aspects, and I appreciate the SIGMM committee once again for the nice travel grant which made this experience possible.
Xiaokun Xu, PhD student, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
The MMsys2022 was my first in-person conference, and it was very well organized and far more than my expectation for an in-person conference since in the past 2 years I participated in some virtual conferences and they were not very good experiences. I thought the in-person conference would be similar. The fact is that I was totally wrong. MMsys2022 was a wonderful experience, the first time I built a real connection with the community and peer researchers. Many things impressed me a lot. For the papers and presentations, I found the poster #75 “Realistic Video Sequences for Subjective QoE Analysis” was really interesting to me. The presentation from the author was very helpful and I talked a lot with the author. Now he is one of my new friends I made from the conference and we still keep in communication through email. Besides the papers, social events were another part that impressed me. All the social events were highly organized and made communication easier for us. I got the opportunity to talk with the authors and ask some questions that I didn’t ask during the presentation, and made some new friends who are doing similar research as me. I also got the chance to talk with some professors who are the top researchers in specific fields. Those are really precious experiences for a PhD student. Overall, MMSys 2022 was an amazing conference and now it’s an encouragement for me to attend more academic communication in future. I’m really grateful to the SIGMM committee for the travel grant, which made this wonderful experience possible.
Sindhu Chellappa, PhD student, University of New Hampshire, US
I am really happy to be part of MMSys at Athlone, Ireland. This is the first in-person conference I have attended after the pandemic. The conference was organized seamlessly, and the keynotes were very interesting. The keynote “Network is the Renderer” by Dr Morgan from Roblox stole the entire show. Along with that, the keynotes by Dr Ali and Dr Mohamed Hefeeda on Low latency streaming and DeepGame respectively were very interesting. The social events were very relaxing and well organized. I had to travel from the US to India and to Ireland. It was a breathtaking trip, but with the student travel grant, it was a boon to attend the conference in-person.
Tzu-Yi Fan, master student, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
I am grateful to receive the student grant for MMSys 2022, which was my first in-person conference. I learned a lot at the conference and had a wonderful experience in Athlone, Ireland. Initially, I felt nervous when I arrived in a distant and unfamiliar place, but the kind and welcomed organization calmed my mind. The schedule of the conference was fruitful. I enjoyed the presentations and keynotes a lot. I presented my paper about high-rise firefighting in the special session. Although I did not speak smoothly at the beginning, I still enjoyed interacting with the audience. Keynote given by Professor Mohamed impressed me a lot. He spoke about the challenges of cloud gaming and introduced a video encoding pipeline to reduce the bandwidth. I also loved the coffee break between sessions. During that time, people worldwide could discuss each other’s research, which I could not do in virtual participation. It was an excellent opportunity to practice demonstrating our research to people from different backgrounds. Moreover, the social events at night were also exciting. I tasted several kinds of beer at the welcome party. Ireland is famous for beer. I was glad to try the local flavour, which I never thought beer could be. Thank the MMSys 2022 organization for holding such a splendid conference and expanding my horizons. I look forward to carrying on my new research and joining more conferences in the future.
Kerim Hodžić, PhD student, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
My name is Kerim Hodžić, and I am a PhD student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science Department at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was my pleasure to attend the ACM/MMSYS 2022 conference held in Athlone, Ireland where I presented my paper „Realistic Video Sequences for Subjective QoE Analysis” which is part of my PhD research. In addition to that, I had an opportunity to learn much from attending all the conference sessions with very interesting paper presentations and also from the special guests who provided us with interesting information about the industry. In social events, I met many people from industry and academia and I hope it will lead to some useful cooperation in the future. This is the best conference I have attended so far in my career and I want to congratulate everyone who organised it. I also want to thank the SIGMM committee for their travel grant, which made this experience possible. Till the next MMSYS! All the best.
Juan Antonio De Rus Arance, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
MMSys’2022 was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to discover other research works in my field. It gave me the chance to meet colleagues working in the same area and discuss ideas with them, opening the doors to possible collaborations. Moreover, participating in the Doctoral Symposium was very didactic. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to attend the conference if it wasn’t for the SIGMM Student travel award and I’m very grateful.
Miguel Fernández Dasí, PhD student, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
I am a PhD student at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, and MMSys 2022 was my first in-person conference. I attended the Doctoral Symposium to present my paper, “Design, development and evaluation of adaptive and interactive solutions for high-quality viewport-aware VR360 video processing and delivery”. It was a great experience meeting fellow PhD students and sharing ideas about different topics, especially with those working in the same area. Furthermore, everyone at the conference was always willing to talk, which I have significantly appreciated as a PhD student and that always led to fascinating conversations. All the keynotes were engaging. I was particularly interested in Prof. Mohamed Hefeeda’s “DeepGame: Efficient Video Encoding for Cloud Gaming” keynote, a topic related to my PhD thesis. I also found Prof. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann’s keynote on “Digital and Robotic Humanoid Twins: for Which Purposes” interesting, a topic I didn’t know about but found great interest in. I am thankful to SIGMM for receiving the Student Travel Grant, which made my attendance at this conference possible.
Melan Vijayaratnam, PhD student, CentraleSupelec, France
I am delighted to have been given a grant for the MMSys conference in Athlone, Ireland. This was my first in-person conference that my supervisor Dr Giuseppe Valenzise really wanted me to attend to meet with the Multimedia community. I went there by myself and it was scary at first to go to the conference without knowing anyone at first. However, being on the doctoral symposium track, my mentor Dr Pablo Cesar helped me with his advice and introduced me to many people and I got to meet other fellow PhD students. It was definitely an incredible experience and I am grateful to have been introduced to this welcoming community.
Chun Wei Ooi, PhD student, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
It was my first time attending the MMsys conference this year. I would like to thank the committee for awarding the travel grants to students such as myself. I presented my research topic at MMVE and received some good suggestions from senior researchers. It was a very fruitful conference where I met different researchers from different backgrounds and levels. I also benefited tremendously from attending the conference because my latest work is partly inspired by the research talk I attended. One of the highlights of attending MMsys in person is its many social events. Not only did they show the best side of the venue, but more importantly I was able to make friends with fellow researchers. Overall MMsys community is a very talented and friendly bunch, I am glad to be a part of it.
Jingwen Zhu, PhD student, Nantes university, France
I was very disappointed that I didn’t receive my visa until the day before the MMSys. However, I got a call from the embassy on the first day of the conference, telling me that my visa application was approved. I shared the news with my supervisor Patrick Le Callet, who insisted that I should buy the next plane to come to the conference and present my research proposal in person.
MMSys is the first conference for me since the beginning of my PhD. As a first-year PhD student, it was a very good opportunity for me to know this excellent community and exchange my research with more experienced researchers. I really appreciate the breakfast with my mentor Dr Ketan Mayer-Patel. He gave me very nice suggestions for my PhD during breakfast. After the conference, he still sent me a good tutorial about how to make a good academic poster. I would like to thank the conference organizers and the travel grand for giving me the opportunity to meet everyone in person. Thanks to everyone who exchanged ideas with me during the conference and especially my DS mentor Ketan. I hope that I can continue to attend MMSys next year!
The 12th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys’21) happened from September 28th through October 1st, 2021. The MMSys conference is an important forum for researchers in multimedia systems. But, due to the ongoing pandemic, the event was held in a hybrid mode – onsite in Istanbul, Turkey, and online. Organizers and chairs (Özgü Alay, Cheng-Hsin Hsu, and Ali C. Begen) worked very hard to make sure the conference was successful, both for the on-site participants (around 50) and the online participants (with a peak of 330 concurrent viewers). For a small description of the event, take a look at the text written by Ali Begen, one of the general chairs. To encourage student authors to participate on-site, SIGMM has sponsored a group of students with Student Travel Grant Awards. Students who wanted to apply for this travel grant needed to submit an online form before the submission deadline. Then, the selection committee chose 7 travel grant winners. The selected students received either 1,000 or 2,000 USD to cover their airline tickets as well accommodation costs for this event. We asked the travel grant winners to share their unique experiences attending MMSys’21. The following are their comments.
Minh Nguyen
It is my honour to receive the SIGMM Student travel award that gives me a golden opportunity to attend the MMSys’2021 conference on-site. This conference is the first one I have attended during the Covid pandemic. I attended the whole conference, and I really appreciate the organizing committee who tried their best to organize this conference in a hybrid mode. It was a very interesting and well-organized conference where many innovative papers were introduced. The venue of the conference is a great place with professional staff and comfortable accommodation and meeting rooms. The local Turkish food attracted me. They were delicious. At this conference, I was happy to meet, connect, and discuss with experts working in multimedia systems, which is close to my PhD thesis. I was interested in informative and passionate keynotes about cutting-edge technologies and their open discussion. Especially, many novel papers motivated me and gave me some ideas for my future work in my PhD thesis. Also, their enjoyable social events brought me a chance to visit Istanbul and experience new things. I look forward to attending future editions of the conference.
Lucas Torrealba A.
I found the conference very interesting. It was my first experience of an in-person conference and it was amazing. The research articles presented seem very relevant to me and the organization did a wonderful job as well. In addition, it seems to be quite a good idea for the future to always leave hybrid ways to participate in the conferences.
Paniz Parastar
The MMsys2021 was my first in-person conference, and since it was highly organized, it raised my expectation of future conferences. Overall, many interesting topics were covered, and I only mentioned a couple of instances here. AI/ML are the hot topics as of today. I believe it’s enjoyable to see them applied in the various aspects of multimedia streaming and other areas as well as in computer vision. Notably, I liked the papers in NOSSDAV sessions on the last day of the conference adapting learning methods to improve the QoE of users. Since I’m working on distinguishing IoT devices and their traffics on the network these days, video clustering papers and mainly the paper that classifies the 360 videos from regular ones based on the traffic features (.i.e., flow and packet level features) were educational to me. Also, comparing subjective and objective quality assessment metrics alongside the various network conditions as they do in the paper may not be a new topic, but it is always interesting to explore. Plus, one of the most exciting talks for me was ‘Games as a Game Changer’, which was part of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Workshop. It changed my perception of games as an entertaining tool that also can help us better understand situations that don’t usually happen in our daily lives.
Ekrem Cetinkaya
MMSys’21 was my first in-person conference experience, and I can gladly say that it was above my expectations. We were welcomed by a fantastic organization, given how difficult the situation was. Everything went so smoothly, from the keynotes to paper presentations to demo sessions, and of course, social events. Personally, two things were the most impressive for me. First, the keynote by Caitlin Kalinowski (Facebook) was given in person, and she had to fly from the U.S. to Istanbul just for this keynote. Second, the hybrid organization was thought through. There was a team of five whose duty was to make sure the conference was insightful for those who could not make it to Istanbul as well. Moreover, the social events and the venues were really lovely. I learned that the MMSys community has a long history, and you could feel that, especially in those social events where it was an amicable environment, meaning that it was also easy for me to do some networking. Overall, I can say the MMSys conference was amazing in all aspects without any doubt. I want to thank the SIGMM committee once again for their travel grant, which made this experience possible.
Ivan Bartolec
The ACM MMSys’21 conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, was an excellent opportunity to meet, interact, and discuss ideas with researchers who are working to develop new and engaging multimedia experiences. This was my first MMSys conference, and it was an excellent environment for both learning and networking, with a thoughtfully selected collection of presentations, engaging keynotes (especially the one from a representative of Facebook), and fun social events. I found the sessions based on video or video streaming to be the most interesting and informative for my field of study. The demo sessions concept was also pretty unique, and by being on-site and seeing the demos and asking questions, I learnt a few things about practical implementations that I find incredibly useful. I’m very thankful for the opportunity to present my PhD research as part of the Doctoral symposium and to receive feedback from conference attendees as well as offline comments and ideas via email, which I gladly responded to. It was an absolute pleasure to attend MMSys’21 on-site, courtesy of the Student Travel Grant, and I look forward to visiting future editions of the conference and continuing to interact with the MMSys community.
Jesus Aguilar Armijo
It has been a pleasure to attend MMSys’2021 in person. This would not have been possible without the SIGMM Student travel award. At the conference, I had the opportunity to attend four keynotes, where I would like to highlight the keynote from Caitlin Kalinowski (Facebook). She presented in person and showed the Virtual Reality devices of her company and future projects with emerging technologies. I found truly engaging the different sessions of MMSys as they were related to my work in network-assisted video streaming. For example, the NOSSDAV session named “Session #1: Yet Another Streaming Session” contained the paper “Common Media Client Data (CMCD): Initial Findings” which I found especially interesting as I use some features of this standard in my work. Moreover, the paper entitled: “Beyond throughput, the next generation: a 5G dataset with channel and context metrics” (from MMSys’20 but presented in MMSys’21) in the open dataset session was particularly interesting for me as I use their previous dataset with 4G as a radio traces for my last paper. During the conference, I had the opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas with different researchers, which I found valuable and insightful. I would also like to highlight the good organization of the conference and the social events. Finally, I presented my work in the Doctoral Symposium session, and I received some interesting questions from the audience. It was a great opportunity, and I am grateful to SIGMM, which allowed me to participate in this extraordinary experience.
Neha Sharma (@NehaSharma) is a PhD student working with Dr Mohamed Hefeeda in Network and Multimedia Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests are in computer vision and machine learning with a focus on next-generation multimedia systems and applications. Her current work focuses on designing an inexpensive hyperspectral camera using a hybrid approach by leveraging both hardware and software solutions. She has been awarded as Best Social Media Reporter of the conference to promote the sharing among researchers on social networks. To celebrate this award, here is a more complete report on the conference.
Being a junior researcher in multimedia systems, I must say I feel proud to be part of this amazing community. I became part of ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys) last year in 2020, where I published my first research work. I was excited to attend MMSys ’20 in Istanbul, which unfortunately shifted online due to COVID-19. I presented my first work online and got to learn about other researchers in the community. This year I was able to publish another work with my team and got selected to present my ideas and research plans in Doctoral Symposium (thanks to reviewers). MMSys’21 gave me hope to have a full conference experience, as we all were hoping to start our lives back to normal. But, as the conference date was approaching, things were still not clear and travel restrictions were still in place. But on the good note, MMSys ’21 became hybrid to provide an opportunity to the people who can travel. It was at the very end I decided to travel and attend MMSys’21 in person. And I am glad I made that decision. My experience was overwhelmingly rich in terms of learning interesting research findings and making inspiring connections in the community. As the recipient of the “Best Social Media Reporter” award, enjoy the highlights of MMSys’ 21 through my lens.
In the light of the ongoing global pandemic, ACM MMSys ’21was held in hybrid mode – onsite in Istanbul, Turkey and online jointly on September 28 – October 1, 2021. Ali C. Begen (Ozyegin University and Networked Media, Turkey) opened the conference onsite with a warm welcome. MMSys’21 became the first-ever hybrid conference where participants presented onsite as well as remotely in real-time. There were participants joining from 38 different countries. The organizing team did an amazing job in pulling off this complex event. This year the research track implemented a two-round submission system, and accepted papers included public reviews in the proceedings. This, however, was not the only first, MMSys ’21 had its first Doctoral Symposium targeting the PhD students and aiming to find their mentors. In addition, there were postponed celebrations for the 30th anniversary of NOSSDAV and the 25th anniversary of Packet Video.
The conference program was very well scheduled. Each day of the conference started with a keynote. There were four insightful and inspiring keynotes from researchers working in cutting edge multimedia technologies. The first day started with a talk titled “AI-Driven Solutions throughout Games’ Lifecycles Leveraging Big Data” by Qiaolin Chen from Tencent IEG Global. Chen discussed how AI and big data are evolving the gaming industry, from intelligent market decisions to data-driven game development. On the second day, Caitlin Kalinowski presented an interesting keynote “Making Impossible Products: How to Get 0-to-1 Products Right”. Caitlin heads the VR Hardware team at Facebook Reality Labs. She shared insights about Oculus and zero-to-one products. The next day, Chris Bregler (Google) talked about “Synthetic Media: New Opportunities and New Challenges”. He discussed recent trends in generative media creation techniques that have opened new possibilities for societally beneficial uses but have also raised concerns about misuse. Last day, Sriram Sethuraman and Deepthi Nandakumar (Amazon) provided insights about “Role of ML in the Prediction of Perceptual Video Quality”. Keynotes are available on youtube to watch on-demand.
This year the conference attracted paper submissions from a range of multimedia topics including immersive media, live video, content preparation, cloud-based and mobile media processing and computer vision systems. Apart from the main research track, MMSys ’21 hosted three workshops:
NOSSDAV – Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video
MMVE – Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems
These workshops provided an opportunity to meet those who are working in focused areas of multimedia research. This year MMSys conducted the inaugural ACM workshop on Game Systems (GameSys ’21). This workshop attracted research on all aspects of computer/digital games, emphasizing networks, systems, interaction, and applications. Highlights include the work presented by Mark Claypool et. Al (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) which conducts a user study measuring attribute scaling for cloud-based games.
In addition to area focussed workshops, MMSys’21 also conducted two grand challenges:
Another main highlight of the conference is the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) workshop. The workshop was tailored towards PhD students, assistant professors and starting researchers in various research organizations. The event openly discussed core topics about parenthood, work-family policies, career paths and EDI aspects at large. Laura Toni, Mea Wang and Ozgu Alay opened the workshop on the third day of the conference. Miriam Redi shared goals to achieve an equitable and inclusive multimedia community. Susanne Boll talked about the target strategy “25 in 25” to increase the participation of women in SIGMM to at least 25% by 2025. Other guest speakers also highlighted some strategies to achieve target diversity and inclusion in MMSys.
Last but not the least, amazing social events. Each day of the conference ended with a well-planned social event providing a great opportunity to the in-person attendees to meet, discuss, and develop professional and social links throughout the community in a more relaxed setting. We had visited some historical venues like Galata Tower and Adile Sultan Palace and enjoyed a Bosphorus boat tour with a live music band. This year MMSys planned the first inter-continental socials. We travelled from the European side to the Asian side of Istanbul (by bus and by boat). As a token of appreciation, in-person participants received Turkish delights and coffee, a set of traditional towels (peştemal), Istanbul-themed puzzles and a hand-made Kütahya Porcelain vase/coffee set as souvenirs. For me, the best part was sitting together and dining with peers, discussing prospects of your own research or multimedia systems research, in general.
