Call for Open Source Software Competition

The ACM Multimedia Open-Source Software Competition celebrates the invaluable contribution of researchers and software developers who advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, applications, and other multimedia software. This year will be the sixth year in running the competition as part of the ACM Multimedia program.

To qualify, software must be provided with source code and licensed in such a manner that it can be used free of charge in academic and research settings. For the competition, the software will be built from the sources. All source code, license, installation instructions and other documentation must be available on a public web page. Dependencies on non-open source third-party software are discouraged (with the exception of operating systems and commonly found commercial packages available free of charge). To encourage more diverse participation, previous years' non-winning entries are welcome to re-submit for the 2009 competition. Student-led efforts are particularly encouraged.

Authors are highly encouraged to prepare as much documentation as possible, including examples of how the provided software might be used, download statistics or other public usage information, etc. Entries will be peer-reviewed to select entries for inclusion in the conference program as well as an overall winning entry, to be recognized formally at ACM Multimedia 2009.  The criteria for judging all submissions include broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other miscellaneous factors (e.g., maturity, popularity, student-led, no dependence on closed source, etc.).

Authors of the winning entry, and possibly additional selected entries, will be invited to demonstrate their software as part of the conference program.  In addition, accepted overview papers will be included in the conference proceedings.

Important Dates:

Submission Instructions

Authors interested in submitting an entry to the open source software competition should prepare a package containing the following information to be submitted via the EDAS online submission system under the Open Source Software Competition track of the ACM Multimedia 2009 Conference ( http://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=7783&track=7413 ):

• Title of submission
• Names and affiliations of authors (indicate students).  In case of a large distributed project, include full list of contributors, if possible, and indicate main contact (e.g., project owner or maintainer).
• Two-page summary paper including an overview of the open-source software package, its description, applications, intended audience, main features, etc.  Selected entries, in addition to the winning entry, will be included in the conference proceedings.
• The paper should be prepared in double-column ACM proceedings style as a PDF file , and should include a public URL for project page where software, documentation, and open-source license can be found.
• Compressed zip archive file with all source code, documentation, build/install instructions, and licenses.

NOTE: If the archive file is more than 5MB in size, please place the file in a web accessible location and include a URL for that location in the PDF paper.  In that case, upload only the PDF paper to the online EDAS submission system.

NOTE: The judging committee will make a reasonable effort to build any submitted software. However, if we are unable to make the software run given a reasonable effort, we must unfortunately exclude it from the competition. Therefore, comprehensive and clear build/install instructions will be a crucial component of any submission.

If you have questions about what can or should be submitted, please feel free to address these questions to the competition chair, Dr. Apostol (Paul) Natsev, prior to the submission deadline. We are excited to be organizing this innovative and creative components of the ACM Multimedia program. Please help us make this venture a continuing success by submitting your entry to the competition. We look forward to your participation.

Contact

For any questions regarding the open source competition please email the chair:

Dr. Apostol (Paul) Natsev (IBM Research) natsev -at- us.ibm.com