SIGMM Records

Editorial

Dear Member of the SIGMM Community,

Welcome to the brand new ACM SIG Multimedia Records!

The SIGMM Records are the SIG Multimedia's quarterly newsletter that provides SIGMM members with a channel for disseminating their achievements to the research community at large. Through the SIGMM Records, SIGMM members can contribute opinions, review papers, books and online material, participate in critical discussions, and present outrageous opinions, or stories about the dissemination of research. The SIGMM forums provide a platform for discussions about SIGMM Records articles that we encourage our readers to use.

This edition of the newsletter concludes the first quarter of 2009. It comes only about two weeks before the full paper deadline for the ACM Multimedia Conference. We hope that many of you have planned to attend the SIGMM's flaghsip event in October in Beijing. To encourage you further, these SIGMM Records bring you a report from the previous ACM Multimedia that was held in 2008 in Vancouver, complete with its table of contents for convenient access to the ACM Digital Library.

One of the special events of the SIG Multimedia year 2009 is also featured in greater detail: The MM Grand Challenge. To be introduced at ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing as a new program for the cooperation between the multimedia community and industry, it is not in fact a single challenge. Rather, many companies that are known for their active involvement in and support for the community announce their challenges to multimedia researchers around the world.

Our featured paper in this edition is Gerald Friedland's personal views and opinions on the various splinters of analytics. He wants to remind us that we are multimedia researchers, which seems to be frequently forgotten. He points out that the division of analytics in fields such as speech research and vision research has created a cultural split in what should be one community, and tries to help out by re-introducing these cultures to each other.

Four PhD student who completed their PhD thesis as members of the SIG Multimedia or under the guidance of SIG members present summaries of their work in this issue. Birgit Zimmermann, Effrosyni Kokiopoulou, Eunyee Koh and Kristopher West are the young researchers to whose work we want to introduce you. And for those Records readers who are interested in investigating YouTube and other Web 2.0 applications that present user-produced content, this issue links to two Open Source tools that can help with crawling and analyzing them: ContextMiner and TubeKit. We are of course also announcing a variety of opportunities and events.

The SIGMM Records are available as an ACM newsletter series with the ISSN 1947-4598. You can find it on the SIGMM website at http://sigmm.org/records and it will be made available through the ACM Digital Library. To receive the highlights of the SIGMM Records by email, you can also subscribe to a mailing list that is used for distributing the Records four times a year. You find subscription information for this mailing list at http://lists.simula.no/mailman/listinfo/sigmm-records@simula.no. No other postings to this mailing list will be allowed, but everybody may subscribe as a reader.

We hope that you enjoy this first Issue of SIGMM Records!

The Editors
Jun Wang
Stephan Kopf
Yi Cui
Regu Radhakrishnan
Carsten Griwodz