ACM SIGMM Test of Time Paper award 2020

In 2020 SIGMM established the SIGMM Test-of-Time Paper award for a paper published 10, 11 or 12 years previously at a SIGMM-sponsored conference, including MM, MMSys, ICMR/CIVR, IH&MMSec, TVX, NOSSDAV, AVI or MIR.

The award recognizes the paper that has had the most impact and influence on the field of Multimedia in terms of research, development, product or ideas, during the intervening years, as selected by a 5-person selection committee.

To start the selection process, we gathered the 58 top-ranked papers from all SIGMM-sponsored conferences and workshops which were held in 2008, 2009 or 2010, and these were selected by citation count from the ACM Digital Library. The selection committee were allowed to add more papers if they chose.

After careful consideration the committee decided that …

2020 Winner:

Andrea Vedaldi and Brian Fulkerson. Vlfeat: An open and portable library of computer vision algorithms. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, MM '10, page 1469-1472, New York, NY, USA, 2010.

2020 Honorable Mention:

Gabriel Takacs, Vijay Chandrasekhar, Natasha Gelfand, Yingen Xiong, Wei-Chao Chen, Thanos Bismpigiannis, Radek Grzeszczuk, Kari Pulli, and Bernd Girod. Outdoors augmented reality on mobile phone using loxel-based visual feature organization. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, MIR '08, page 427-434, New York, NY, USA, 2008.

The 2020 winner and 2020 honourable mention were announced at the ACM Multimedia Conference in October 2020.

In responding to the announcement, Andrea Vedaldi, one of the co-authors of the winning paper, said “We are very grateful to the SIGMM committee for selecting our work on VLFeat as a winner of the SIGMM Test of Time award. We are delighted that our work could help many researchers and engineers in image and video understanding over the years. There are many contributors to VLFeat, too many to mention individually in this message. Our thanks go to them as well as to the ACM community for recognising and supporting our efforts, sustaining our enthusiasm for the project. May this award inspire new generations of open source contributions, and enjoy the conference!”

Bernd Girod one of the co-authors of the honourable mention, said “In 2007, when we first demonstrated our mobile augmented reality system to our sponsors on Stanford campus, there were no smartphones yet. Our system drained the cameraphone's battery in about 10 minutes, so we couldn’t linger and had to walk really fast.  If our idea stood the test of time, it is due to the incredible progress that hardware engineers have made to make mobile devices orders of magnitudes more powerful and efficient.”

Bernd Girod was actually in the audience (on zoom) during the announcement and jumped into the presentation with an anecdote that when the paper was originally submitted, it was rejected and his students were very disappointed. He told them, however, not to be put off but to work hard, to improve the paper and re-submit it to the MIR workshop in 2008, and now, 12 years later, it gets its recognition.

- Alan Smeaton
- SIGMM Chair