SIGMM's funded initiatives 2020

In late 2019 the SIGMM Executive invited applications for funding for new initiatives, submitted by SIGMM members. These initiatives were to focus on one, or more, of the following:

    - building on SIGMM’s excellence and strengths;
    - nurturing new talent in the SIGMM community;
    - addressing weakness(es) in the SIGMM community and in SIGMM activities

This was our third year for issuing this call and we received a very strong response from the SIGMM community. Submissions were evaluated and assessed by the SIGMM Executive and the following awards have been made:

SIGMM will support some student travel to the following events:
- the African Winter School in Multimedia, Stellenbosch, South Africa, July 2020
- the Adaptive Streaming Summer School, Klagenfurt,
- the Content Based Multimedia Information (CBMI) Conference, Lille, France, September 2020
- The International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience, QoMEX, Athlone, Ireland, May 2020 for female and under-represented minority students
- the IMX Conference, Barcelona, June 2020, travel for under-represented minorities
- the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation, workshop, late 2020
- the MMSys 2020 conference, Istanbul, Turkey, June 2020, travel for non-student minorities

In addition, SIGMM will fund
- a women and diversity in multimedia indexing lunch at CBMI,
- a diversity lunch and childcare support at the Information Hiding and Multimedia Security Workshop IH&MMSec in Denver, Colorado, US in June 2020,
- childcare support and a diversity and an inclusion panel discussion at IMX,
- a multimedia evaluation methodology workshop at the MediaEval workshop,
- childcare support and an N2Women meeting at MMSys.

SIGMM will also support some of the costs of software development and presentation for Conflow at ACM Multimedia in Seattle. ConfFlow is an application to encourage people with similar or complementary research interests to find each other at conferences. Conflow is s follow up initiative to ConfLab: Meet the Chairs! held at ACM MM 2019 (conflab.ewi.tudelft.nl) to help people in the multimedia community to connect with potential collaborators.

Finally, the ICMR in Dublin in June 2020 will be the testbed for calculation of a conference’s carbon footprint, covering air travel to/from the venue as well as the costs of local transport, food, accommodation, etc. CO2e calculator and awareness. This will initially be done for ICMR and the process of calculating will documented and made available for other events.

These funded initiatives are in addition to the centralised SIGMM support for student travel at our sponsored conferences (MM, MMAsia, ICMR, MMSys, IH&MMSec, IMX) announced at the SIGMM business meeting last year, and our subsistence of early-bird registrations for SIGMM members at these events in 2020.

Alan Smeaton
Chair, SIGMM