ACM SIGMM Executive Committee Newsletter – 1, 2022
July 4, 2022
The Special Interest Group in Multimedia of ACM, ACM SIGMM, provides a forum for researchers, engineers, and practitioners in all aspects of multimedia computing, communication, storage, and applications. We do this through our sponsorship and organization of conferences and workshops, supporting student travel to such events, discounted registrations, two regional chapters, recognition of excellence and achievement through an awards scheme, and we inform the Multimedia community of our activities through the SIGMM Records, social media and through mailing lists. Information on joining SIGMM can be found at https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/sigs/sigmm. The SIGMM Executive Committee Newsletter in SIGMM Records periodically reports on the topics discussed and the decisions assumed in the Executive Committee meetings to improve transparency and sense of community. SIGMM Executive Committee Meeting 2022-03-16 Attended: Alberto Del Bimbo (Chair); Phoebe Chen (Vice-Chair); Miriam Redi (Conference Director); Changsheng Xu, Ketan Mayer-Patel, Kiyoharu Aizawa, Pablo Cesar, Prabhakaran, Balakrishnan, Qi Tian, Susanne Boll, Tao Mei, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Alan Smeaton (SIGMM Executive Committee members); Xavier Alameda Pineda (Invited guest) Sent justification and comments: Lexing Xie (SIGMM Executive Committee member). We discussed the 2022 SIGMM budget. The SIGMM budget is in a good shape, and we foresee room for new initiatives to strengthen and expand the SIGMM community and improve our communication via existing and new channels. We approved a revision ...
Introducing the new role of the Director of Diversity and Outreach
October 21, 2019
Over the last few decades SIGMM has grown with regard to the number and size of conferences and workshops we organize and sponsor, and we have grown with regard to our international outreach. Researchers from all over the world now participate in SIGMM and its many activities. In the same way in which we grow internationally with regard to members, with regard to the participants attending our conferences and their different backgrounds, the diversity of SIGMM is also growing. However, we can observe that diversity and all the aspects it brings to a society is not necessarily “just something” but needs to be supported and embraced by a cultural change of the organization and all its members. Introducing the new role of SIGMM Director of Diversity and Outreach In 2019, SIGMM created the new role of SIGMM Director of Diversity and Outreach with a variety of roles and responsibilities, for an initial 3-year period. Creation of this position is a sign and an action to establish future activities and an invitation on a more formal level to move our work in this area beyond anecdotal activities and personal engagement. The Director of Diversity and Outreach will be a voting member of the ...
Gender Diversity in SIGMM: We’ll Just Leave This Here As Well
December 21, 2018
1. Introduction and Background SIGMM is the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) in Multimedia, one of 36 SIGs in the ACM family. ACM itself was founded in 1947 and is the world’s largest educational and scientific society for computing, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals. With almost 100,000 members worldwide, ACM is a strong force in the computing world and is dedicated to advancing the art, science, engineering, and application of information technology. SIGMM has been operating for nearly 30 years and sponsors 5, soon to be 6, major international conferences each year as well as dozens of workshops and an ACM Transactions Journal. SIGMM sponsors several Excellence and Achievement Awards each year, including awards for Technical Achievement, Rising Star, Outstanding PhD Thesis, TOMM best paper, and Best TOMM Associate Editor award. SIGMM funds student travel scholarships to almost all our conferences with nearly 50 such student travel grants at the flagship MULTIMEDIA conference in Seoul, Korea, in 2018. SIGMM has two active chapters, one in the Bay Area of San Francisco and one in China. It has a very active online activity with social media reporters at our conferences, a regular SIGMM Records newsletter, and a weekly news digest. ...
SIGMM Records: News, Statistics, and Call for Contributions & Suggestions
October 5, 2018
A new editorial team has committed to lead the ACM SIGMM Records since the issue of January 2017. The goal is to consolidate the Records as a primary source of information and a communication vehicle for the multimedia community. With these objectives in mind, the Records were re-organized around three main categories (Open Science, Information, and Opinion), for which specific sections and columns were created (more details in http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/08/sigmm-records-serving-the-community/). Since then, all sections and columns have provided relevant and high-quality contributions, with a higher impact than anticipated. Since the new epoch of the Records, apart from new columns, two additional initiatives have been incorporated: Best social media reporter: It was decided to award the SIGMM members with the most intense and valuable posts on Social Media during the SIGMM conferences. The selected Best Social Media Reporters are asked to provide a post-conference report to be published in the Records, and get a free registration to one of the upcoming SIGMM conferences. Up to now, the awardees have been: Miriam Redi (ICMR 2017), Christian Timmerer (MMSYS 2017), Benoit Huet and Conor Keighrey (MM 2017), Cathal Gurrin (ICMR 2018) and Gwendal Simon (MMSYS 2018). The criteria for the awards are specified here: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/20/awarding-the-best-social-media-reporters/ Section on QoE: Starting ...
Impact of the New @sigmm Records
September 20, 2017
The SIGMM Records have renewed, with the ambition of continue being a useful resource for the multimedia community. The intention is to provide a forum for (open) discussion and to become a primary source of information (and of inspiration!). The new team (http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/impressum/) has committed to lead the Records in the coming years, gathering relevant contributions in the following main clusters: Open science: with columns on open source software, datasets and benchmarks, and standards. Opinion: with columns on multi-disciplinary topics, interviews to outstanding members of our community, and viewpoints of the community. Information: current affairs including call for papers, summaries of PhD theses, open positions, and reports from our social media leaders. The team has also revitalized the presence of SIGMM on Social Media. SIGMM accounts on Facebook and Twitter have been created for disseminating relevant news, events and contributions for the SIGMM community. Moreover, a new award has been approved: the Best Social Media Reporters from each SIGMM conference will get a free registration to one of the SIGMM conferences within a period of one year. The award criteria are specified at http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/2017/05/20/awarding-the-best-social-media-reporters/ The following paragraphs detail the impact of all these new activities in terms of increased number of visitors and visits to the Records website (Figure 1), and broaden reach. ...
@sigmm Records: serving the community
May 8, 2017
The SIGMM Records are renewing, with the continued ambition of being a useful resource for the multimedia community. We want to provide a forum for (open) discussion, but also to become the primary source of information for our community. Firstly, I would like to thank Carsten who was run, single-handed, the whole records for many many years. We all agree that he has done an amazing job, and that his service deserves our gratitude, and possibly some beers, when you meet him at conferences and meetings. As you are probably aware, a number of changes in the records are underway. We want your opinions and suggestions to make this resource the best it can be. Hence, we need your help to make this a success, so please drop us a line if you want to join the team. The two main visible changes are: We have a new amazing team to lead the records in the coming years. I am so glad to have their help: http://sigmm.hosting.acm.org/impressum/ We have reorganized the records and its structure, in three main clusters: Open science: with columns on open source software, datasets and benchmarks, and standards. Opinion: with columns on multi-disciplinary topics, interviews to outstanding members of our community, and the viewpoints of the community. Information: ...
Editorial
February 11, 2014Dear Member of the SIGMM Community, welcome to the last issue of the SIGMM Records in 2013. The editors of the Records have taken to a classical reporting approach, and you can read here the first of series of interviews. In this issue, Cynthia Liem is interview by Mathias Lux, and explains about the Phenicx project. We have received a report from the first international competition on game-based learning applications, and also our regular column reporting from the 106th MPEG meeting that was held in Geneva. Our open source column presents libraries and tools for threading and visualizing a large video collection in this issue, a set of tools that will be useful for many in the community. Beyond that, you also read about two PhD thesis. Among the announcements are several open positions, and a long list of calls for paper. The long list of calls is achieved by a policy change in SIGMM. After several years that have seen our two public mailing lists, sigmm@pi4.informatik.tu-mannheim.de and mm-interest@acm.org, flooded by calls for papers, the board and online services editors have decided to change the posting policy. Both lists are now closed for public submissions of calls for paper and participation. Instead, calls must ...
Editorial
October 21, 2013Dear Member of the SIGMM Community, welcome to the third issue of the SIGMM Records in 2013. On the verge of ACM Multimedia 2013, we can already present the receivers of SIGMM’s yearly awards, the SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, the SIGMM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, the TOMCCAP Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award, and the TOMCCAP Best Associate Editor Award. The TOMCCAP Special Issue on the 20th anniversary of ACM Multimedia is out in October, and you can read both the announcement, and find each of the contributions directly through the TOMCCAP Issue 9(1S) table of contents. That SIGMM has established a strong foothold in the scientific community can also be seen by the Chinese Computing Federation’s rankings of SIGMM’s venues. Read the article to get even more motivation for submitting your papers to SIGMM’s conferences and journal. We are also reporting from SLAM, the international workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia. Not a SIGMM event, but certainly of interest to many SIGMMers who care about audio technology. You find also two PhD thesis summaries, and 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, ...
Editorial
August 2, 2013Dear Member of the SIGMM Community, welcome to the second issue of the SIGMM Records in 2013. SIGMM has elected a new board, to guide the SIG through the next couple of years and develop it further. The new board, under the chairmanship of Professor Shih-Fu Chang introduces itself in this issue of the Records. Among the first acts of the new board was the call for bids for ACM Multimedia 2016, announced also in this issue. Of course, we have also several other contributions: the OpenSource column introduces OpenIMAJ, while the MPEG column brings the press release for the 104th MPEG meeting. We can also reveal a change of leadership in FXPal, a research company with many SIGMM members in its ranks and a former SIGMM chair as departing president. We put also a spotlight on the ongoing season for MediaEval, the multimedia benchmarking initiative, and we include four PhD thesis summaries in this issue. Of course, we include also a variety of calls for contribution. Please give attention to two particular ones: TOMCCAP has chosen its special issue topic for 2014 and includes a call for papers in this issue of the Records. And also MTAP has issued a special issue call for paper. Last ...
Editorial
April 23, 2013Dear Member of the SIGMM Community, welcome to the first issue of the SIGMM Records in 2013. This issue is full of opportunities that SIGMM gives you in 2013. Inside you find the calls for nominations for SIGMM’s three main awards: The SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, awarded for lasting contributions in our field, the SIGMM Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis, awarded for the best thesis in our field that was defended in the 12 months of 2012, and the Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award for the best paper that was published in an issue of TOMCCAP in 2012. One of the major changes in SIG life is upcoming: SIGMM elects new chairs, and we want to remind you to cast your vote. Our current chair, Klara Nahrstedt, gave an interview for the Records on the issue of ACM Fellowships. Three PhD thesis summaries are included in this issue, and in our regular columns, you can read news from the 103rd MPEG meeting, in the education column you can learn about a practice book on visual information retrieval, and a toolset for DASH is presented in the open source column. Of course, we include also a variety of calls for contribution. Please give attention to ...