Introducing the new role of the Director of Diversity and Outreach

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 … Read more

Opinion Column: Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (in Multimedia)

The inclusiveness and transparency of automatic information processing methods is a research topic that exhibited growing interest in the past years. In the era of digitized decision-making software where the push for artificial intelligence happens worldwide and at different strata of the socio-economic tissue, the consequences of biased, unexplainable and … Read more

An Interview with Professor Susanne Boll

Describe your journey into research from your youth up to the present. What foundational lessons did you learn from this journey?  My journey into research started with my interest in computers and computer science at school while I was still in my early years at that time. I liked all … Read more

Report from MMSYS 2019 – by Alia Sheikh

Alia Sheikh (@alteralias) is researching immersive and interactive content. At present she is interested in the narrative language of immersive environments and how stories can best be choreographed within them. Being part of an international academic research community and actually meeting said international research community are not exactly the same … Read more

Qualinet Databases: Central Resource for QoE Research – History, Current Status, and Plans

Introduction Datasets are an enabling tool for successful technological development and innovation in numerous fields. Large-scale databases of multimedia content play a crucial role in the development and performance evaluation of multimedia technologies. Among those are most importantly audiovisual signal processing, for example coding, transmission, subjective/objective quality assessment, and QoE … Read more

MPEG Column: 127th MPEG Meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been modified/updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. The 127th MPEG meeting concluded on July 12, 2019 in Gothenburg, Sweden with the following topics: Versatile Video Coding (VVC) enters formal approval stage, experts predict 35-60% improvement over HEVC … Read more

JPEG Column: 84th JPEG Meeting in Brussels, Belgium

The 84th JPEG meeting was held in Brussels, Belgium. This meeting was characterised by significant progress in most of JPEG projects and also exploratory studies. JPEG XL, the new image coding system, has issued the Committee Draft, giving shape to this new effective solution for the future of image coding. JPEG Pleno, the standard … Read more

Dataset Column: Datasets for Online Multimedia Verification

Introduction Online disinformation is a problem that has been attracting increased interest by researchers worldwide as the breadth and magnitude of its impact is progressively manifested and documented in a number of studies (Boididou et al., 2014; Zhou & Zafarani, 2018; Zubiaga et al., 2018). This emerging area of research … Read more

Dataset Column: Report from the MMM 2019 Special Session on Multimedia Datasets for Repeatable Experimentation (MDRE 2019)

Special Session Information retrieval and multimedia content access have a long history of comparative evaluation, and many of the advances in the area over the past decade can be attributed to the availability of open datasets that support comparative and repeatable experimentation. Sharing data and code to allow other researchers … Read more

PhD Thesis Summary

Title: A Three Layer System for Audio-visual Quality Assessment

The development of models for quality prediction of both audio and video signals is a fairly mature field. But, although several multimodal models have been proposed, the area of audiovisual quality prediction is still an emerging area. In fact, despite the reasonable performance obtained by combination and parametric metrics, currently … Read more