SIGMM FY'R09 Annual Report

June 2008 - June 2009

1. SIGMM Sponsored Conferences and Workshops

We have sponsored three major venues during the 2008 period, the ACM Multimedia 2008 (the International Conference on Multimedia), ACM NOSSDAV 2008 (Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video) Workshop, and the ACM MIR (Multimedia Information Retrieval) event. All venues were a success and we will present reports from the venues.

1.1. ACM Multimedia 2008 Conference Highlights

ACM Multimedia 2008 was held in Vancouver, Canada, Pan Pacific Hotel from October 27-31, 2008. We are happy to report that we had a very strong quality and variety of program as well as record number of attendees. Prof. Abdulmotaleb El Saddik from Univ. of Ottawa and Prof. Son Vuong from Univ. of British Columbia were the general chairs for the conference. The program committee and the organization committee were excellent. The team is listed in Appendix A.

The main conference was attended by 502 participants, where 487 registered and 15 participants were special cases (Artists that did not register). Out of the number of registered attendees, 487, we had paid actual ACM members 219, paid actual non-members 170 and paid students 98.

243 participants attended workshops (among which 111 MIR where MIR was a separate co-located conference), 128 participants attended the tutorials. The total revenue was $329,921.

Tutorials: We have scheduled nine half-day tutorials on October 27 (Monday). We grouped them into four areas: (a) content access - how to facilitate end-user access to multimedia content - 3 half day tutorials, (b) ubiquitous multimedia - personal and ambient multimedia environments - two half-day tutorials; (c) multimedia devices - how is multimedia effectively delivered - two half-day tutorials, and (d) tools you can use - how do you make your multimedia ideas real - two half-day tutorials.

Schedule (Monday, October 27, 2008)

Workshops:Workshops have always been an important part of the conference. In 2008, the following eight workshops have been organized as part of the conference:

1. Vision Networks for Behavior Analysis (VNBA) - Chairs: Hamid Aghajan, Andrea Prati
2. Semantic Ambient Media Experiences (SAME) - Chairs: Artur Lugmayr, Thomas Risse, Bjorn Stocklebel, Juha Kaario, Kari Laurila
3. TRECVID BBC Rushes Summarization Workshop (TVS) - Chairs: Paul Over, Alan Smeaton
4. Story Representation, Mechanism and Context (SRMC) - Chairs: Kevin Brooks, Aisling Kelliher, Frank Nack
5. Analysis and Retrieval of Events/Actions and Workflows in Video Streams (AREA) - Chairs: Anastasios D. Doulamis, Luc Van Gool, Mark Nixon, Theodora A. Varvarigou, Nicolaos D. Doulamis
6. The Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics (MS) - Chairs: Farshad Fotouhi, William Grosky, Peter Stanchev
7. Communicability Design and Evaluation in Cultural and Ecological Multimedia Systems (Communicability MS) - Chair: Francisco V.C. Ficarra
8. Human-Centered Computing (HCC) - Chairs: Alejandro James, Daniela Nicklas, Nicu Sebe.

The workshops were well attended with the smaller workshops being highly interactive. Note that MIR (Multimedia Information Retrieval) workshop for the first time did not happen as a workshop. This workshop became a sponsored conference by SIGMM, and it was co-located with ACM Multimedia 2008 in Vancouver.

Technical Program: The main conference had a rich three day program (October 28-30). All activities started at 8:30am and ended at 5:30pm. The conference covered a wide range of topics from foundation of multimedia, through multimedia system, networks, and multimedia interactions to multimedia content, applications, human-centered multimedia, and multimedia art. In addition, the interactive art program consisted of the art exhibit that was held at the Science World British Columbia, and the art conference track. The exhibition explored the theme "Border Zones". Artworks used multimedia to shift, traverse, intersect and combine genres and modalities to provoke the emergence of new frameworks. The art conference track included long and short papers describing interactive multimedia artworks, tools, applications, and technical approaches for the creative use of multimedia content and technology and management of art-related media collections.

Main Technical Program: The main program sessions were divided into 4 technical tracks and one arts track. The four technical tracks were in the area of multimedia content, multimedia systems, multimedia applications and human-centered multimedia. Each of the tracks had long and short papers. We had brave new topics session covering areas: "Delivering Online Advertisements Inside Images", "Social Signal Processing: State of the Art and Future Perspectives of an Emerging Domain", and "Event Recognition: Viewing the World with a Third Eye".

The Content, Applications, Systems, and Multimedia Interactions tracks received 280 long paper submissions (109 in Content, 84 in Applications, 50 in Systems, and 37 in Multimedia Interactions). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a single-blind review process. The program committee met on June 20, 2008 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 56 long papers: 23 in the Content track, 16 in the Applications track, 9 in the Systems track, and 8 in the Multimedia Interactions track. This represents an acceptance rate of 20 percent.

The short paper program received 236 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 80 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 33 percent. These short papers were presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year's fifth version of the Interactive Arts Program also consisted of long and short papers as well as an art exhibition which took place at Telus World of Science.

Panels: The main program also included two exciting panels:

1. Panel 1 on Wednesday, October 29, 2008
   • Topic: Connecting Artists and Scientists in Multimedia Research
   • Organizers: A. Kerne, R. Wakkary, F, Nack; Panelists: A. Steggell, A. Jaimes, S. Candan, A. Del Bimbo, P. Jennings, A. Hulic
2. Panel 2 on Thursday, October 30
   • Topic: Multimedia Education - Can we find unity in diversity?
   • Organizers: G. Friedland, W. Hurst, L. Knipping; Panelists: R. Jain, M. Muhlhauser, A. El Saddik, T. Darrell

Keynote Speakers: We had two keynote speakers on Tuesday, October 28, 2009 and on Thursday, October 30, 2009. On Tuesday, Professor Raj Jain from Washington University, St. Louis, gave a talk "Internet 3.0: The Next Generation Internet". On Thursday, Professor David Roberts from University of Salford, UK talked about "Face-to-Face: communicating appearance, attention and activity across a distance".

Doctoral Symposium: This event was on Wednesday, October 29, 2009, organized and chaired by Prof. Hari Sundaram and Kiyoharu Aizawa. Six PhD students presented their PhD work and received extensive feedback from different attending faculty.

Technical Demonstrations: We had two major technical demonstration sessions on Wednesday, October 29 and Thursday, October 30. Both demonstration sessions were very well attended and discussed. Each demonstration session showed 12 very interesting demonstrations.

Open Source Competition: This competition became a very good tradition at ACM Multimedia conferences. We had open source competition on Thursday, October 30, 2008. Five open source demonstrations were selected for the final competition.

Interactive Arts Track: This track had three sessions with long papers and one session with short papers. In addition, the Interactive Arts Program consisted of an art exhibition at the Science World British Columbia Museum. This art exhibition showed artworks that explored Border Zones. The zone that uses multimedia to shift, traverse, intersect, and combine genres and modalities to provoke the emergence of new frameworks.

Awards: On Wednesday, October 29, 2008, during the conference banquet, best paper awards were given out for a long paper, short paper, best art contribution, best technical demonstration, best video demonstration, and the open source winner was announced, all funded by our industrial sponsors, e.g., the best art contribution was funded by Telefonica.

• The best long paper award went to
  "Streaming of Plants in Distributed Virtual Environments" by Sebastien Mondet (University of Toulouse), Wei Cheng (National University of Singapore), Geraldine Morin (University of Toulouse), Romulus Grigoras (University of Toulouse), Frederic Boudon (CIRAD), and Wei Tsang Ooi (National University of Singapore).
  Four papers from the Best Paper Session were recommended to be included in the ACM TOMCCAP special issue.
• Open source competition winner was
  "Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM)" by Motama GmbH.
• Best demo award: M. Hefeeda, C. Hsu, and Y. Liu, Testbed and Experiments for Mobile TV (DVB-H) Networks, ACM Multimedia'08 Technical Demonstration, pp. 995--996, Vancouver, Canada, October 2008.

The generous support of our sponsors made several key aspects of the conference possible, including the various prizes, student travel, and the Interactive Arts Program. Organizing this event would be difficult without the generous support of our sponsors. The following awards were presented during the conference banquet under various categories using sponsored or self-generated conference funds.

1. Best full technical paper - $700
2. Best short technical paper - $500
3. Best Art Contribution - $700
4. Best Demonstration - $500
5. Open Source Winner - $500
6. Best Video Program - $500
7. Student Travel Award - $4000

We have included the presentation session at the conference where four best paper nominees competed for the best full technical paper. This year we have not differentiated between student and non-student best papers. An awards committee made up of senior researchers in the field met afterwards to select the winner and announced him/her at the banquet.

Video Preservation Efforts at ACM Multimedia 2008: Both keynote speeches were taped as well as the session with the four competing best papers on Tuesday, October 28, 2008. Matthias Hollick was the preservation chair and worked with ACM to bring these taped sessions to the Digital Library.

General Impressions and Feedback: The conference was very successful as the record attendance is showing. The attendees give a very positive feedback about the conference. There were several reasons:

1. Participants liked the conference site since all sessions were close to each other and participants met at coffee breaks from different areas for various discussions. Lunches were together hence people could again meet and talk. Conference service was very good and personnel was very responsive to any glitches that occurred.
2. The food was outstanding, we provided everyday different kind of food to reflect the diversity of Canada as a Nation and to leave good memories about our culture and raison-d'être: Tuesday (Mediterranean), Wednesday (Pacific Rim), Thursday (Italiano Classico), and Friday (Taste of the Orient).
3. The conference organizing committee was excellent .The program chairs both in technical program and interactive arts program did very well and the main program was very strong. We heard very positive comments about the overall program including the workshops, which had all plenty of room for their participants and could stay in the conference space. In summary, all members of the organization committee pulled their weight and contributed in each event category to a great success with respect to selection of tutorials, conference events and workshops.
4. The technical committee met with the general chair, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, during the TPC meeting at Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in June 2007 where various organizational issues were discussed. This discussion helped the chairs tremendously in the final preparation of the program and conference. Also, we would like to thank Prof. Ralf Steinmetz for hosting and sponsoring the event.

Sponsors: We had an incredible support from the following sponsors: Google, FXPal, Yahoo!, Microsoft Research, IBM, RICOH California Research Center, Telefonica, LG Electronics Mobile Research; Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Nokia Products Ltd., Technical University Darmstadt Multimedia Communications Laboratory (KOM ), the Hessischen Telemedia Technologie Kompetenz-Center (HTTC), University of Ottawa, The University of British Columbia, School of Interactive Arts and Technology. The sponsors together supported us with more than $40K.

Outlook: The next ACM Multimedia 2009 will be in October 19-24, 2009 in Beijing, China.

1.2. ACM NOSSDAV 2008

The 18^th Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV) 2008 was held at the Institute of Operating Systems and Computer Networks (IBR) at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig) on May 29 and 30, 2008. The motto of NOSSDAV 2008 was "interactivity". This was meant to underline the workshop feeling of NOSSDAV, which should inspire attendees to interact with each other, and also cover the scientific program, where system and networking support for interactive multimedia should play a major role. Also under this motto, we had included an extended demonstration session into the workshop that should allow attendees to interact with their colleagues' experimental multimedia systems.

Attendees expressed that they liked the workshop program and that they were very satisfied with the IBR staff who guaranteed the smooth running of the workshop and who took immediate care of all attendees' needs. The demonstration session was introduced following discussions about the future direction of NOSSDAV at ACM Multimedia 2007, and the feedback on including such a session that we received from participants was very positive as well. The program included also a keynote speech by Jörg Liebeherr of the University of Toronto, who gave a talk titled "Overlays can do more ... if not everything" and an invited talk by Paulo Mendes of INESC, Porto, on "Cooperative Networking as Boosting Tool for Internet Interactivity". The two talks presented quite different views of one of the currently hottest topics in our research, the potential of distributed systems with end-user involvement, and generated a lot of discussion.

The workshop was sponsored by ACM SIG Multimedia, with co-sponsorship by TU Braunschweig and Simula Research Laboratory AS (Simula). NEC and Ericsson were further sponsors of the workshop. TU Braunschweig and Simula took the financial risk of the workshop, which allowed a much more optimistic cost-estimate than would otherwise have been possible.

Paper Submission & Review Process: We used EDAS for paper submission, paper review and discussion (but not for the submission of camera ready), and it worked pretty well. The charge was 6 USD per paper. Basic statistics on submissions: 62 papers registered, abstract received; 50 papers were actually submitted (from 20 different countries); and 17 papers were accepted (34% acceptance rate, from 11 different countries).

We solicited also demo submissions, which were handled outside EDAS because reviewing requirements were supposed to be much less strict and costs could be cut in this manner. We received 20 submissions and accepted 12 two-page abstracts (from 10 different countries) for inclusion into the proceedings. Two more demos were presented without including an abstract in the proceedings; one of those was a demo that was well-represented by a full paper. The other involved the collection of user feedback for a video quality investigation, and we wanted to give the author the opportunity to meet candidate users at NOSSDAV.

The accepted papers were arranged into six sessions, entitled "networking for virtual worlds", "networking and operating system support", "digital audio and video", "video streaming in wireless environments", "analyses and conclusions", and "streaming with P2P support".

All papers were reviewed by at least 3 reviewers (most by 4), followed by an online discussion period. All reviewers completed their assignments, and nearly all reviews were received on time. The workshop chairs made the final decision. Most of the accepted papers were clearly accepted by the reviewers, two were proposed for acceptance by the reviewers after the discussion phase, while the final two papers were ranked accept-if-room with an inconclusive outcome of the discussion.

Proceedings: We requested and received an ISBN number from ACM after collecting final papers and the authors' copyright forms. We created the proceedings manually from the authors' final versions of the full and demo contributions, and had them printed at a local printer in Braunschweig. We created a single PDF from the front matter including copyright statement, index and keynote abstracts, from the full and demo papers and made sure to follow the new ACM style guide for the cover. The cooperation with the local printer worked very well, we delivered the entire proceedings in one PDF but separately from the cover, and had it printed successfully in the second try. We produced 100 copies of the proceedings.

Venue: We followed the example of NOSSDAV 2007 and held the workshop at TU Braunschweig, one of the chairs' home institutions. We had also considered a conference hotel in the Harz mountains outside the city, but several reasons favored the university. It is easy to travel by train to and from Braunschweig from major cities and airports. The city itself has a long history, it does itself attract tourists and the university is located right in its center. Furthermore, the university infrastructure is excellent, and for the demonstration session in particular, a good networking infrastructure was vital. The easy reach did also attract several other researchers from Braunschweig and close-by universities. Last but not least the location at Technische Universität Braunschweig did also reduce costs. Travel-wise, Germany was a reasonable choice. Visas were apparently granted without any difficulties except for the German embassy in China, which was not satisfied with scanned letters but needed courier-delivered originals. We didn't hear of any troubles with border controls.

The workshop included a reception on May 28 and a social event at May 29. The reception was held at IBR in TU Braunschweig in the same facilities that were used for coffee breaks and lunches during the workshop. The participants felt well cared-for during the workshop days. The social event started out with a river tour on the river Oker through the city, which ended at the Oker Terrassen, where the conference dinner was held outdoors on the terraces. The dinner buffet was good and plentiful, and people did stay for long discussions. Most attendees' hotels were in easy reach from the restaurant, so the event faded out slowly.

Registration: We considered using ACM's recommended online registration service regonline.com for registrations. This appeared impractical since RegOnline doesn't offer an integration with bank accounts in the Euro zone, let alone in Germany. Instead, we used the local service Booqtic that is specialized on Internet tickets sales. While fairly cheap, able to operate with German bank accounts and responsive to our needs, the differences between a ticket ordering service and a registration service became obvious for attendees who registered more than one person.

There were 62 registered participants. The number of registrations was higher than expected, and we were able to support the keynote speaker and the invited speaker beyond waiving their registration by paying them 500 EUR each.

Program: After longer considerations concerning attendees possible travel plans, we decided to arrange NOSSDAV in a reception evening, followed by two full days (Thursday and Friday), rather than arranging two half and one full days. As intended, the schedule motivated nearly everybody to arrive on Wednesday and stay until Saturday and it avoided late arrivals and (nearly all) early departures. The downside was that of a somewhat less flexible schedule.

We observed last year that the panel-style final discussion of papers didn't lead to the desirable broad questions, but mainly to more questions for the last or the most controversial speaker. We tried to improve this by keeping presenters' main theses on a blackboard, and it may have helped to spread the questions more widely. It didn't inspire the broad questions, or even if it did, it was usually only one presenter who answered. Furthermore, even though the schedule did give a lot of room for questions, the two days appeared rather packed and intense, and the schedule was kept rather strictly. All presentations were captured on video and will be made available through the conference web page.

Budget: The total actual revenue was Euro 15,188.10.

Feedback: The participants liked the conveniences of the location at the university; The helpfulness and efficiency of the local organizers was frequently complimented; Participants enjoyed easy access to the network. Those coming from institutions participating in Eduroam did not even need guest logins; The inclusion of an extended demo session was very welcome and inspired a lot of interaction. Many of the demos were based on NOSSDAV articles of the last few years.

Outlook: ACM NOSSDAV 2009 was held in early June (June 3-5) 2009 in Williamsburg, Virginia, with general chair Prof. Ketan Mayer-Patel. The final report and financial closure are not ready at the time of the SIGMM July 2009 final report, hence we will report� the final status of NOSSDAV 2009 in 2010 SIGMM final report.

The ACM NOSSDAV 2010 will be held early June 2010 in Amsterdam, Netherland. The general chair will be Prof. Dick Bulterman.

1.3 ACM MIR 2008

The 1st International ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR2008) was held in Vancouver, Canada from October 30-31st, 2008. The goal of MIR was to illuminate new paradigms, theories, and insights in the area of multimedia information retrieval. Topics of special interest included exploration of media archives; interfaces for multimedia exploration; indexing and search of multimedia data: digital life experience analysis and retrieval; video surveillance browsing and retrieval; learning and relevance feedback in multimedia retrieval; and diverse applications in culture, society, and science.

In the past decade there have been a wide variety of relatively small workshop activities from several ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which were related to multimedia retrieval. The workshops delved into diverse questions involving digital life and lifebits, video surveillance and analysis of human activity, exploration of media archives, etc.

In 2008, we have attempted to cluster the disparate activities to create this conference. Last year, the combined MIR related workshop activities from ACM SIGs had less than 120 full paper submissions. However, this year we received 308 unique full paper submissions of which 262 papers were selected by the organizing committee for the double-blind peer review process. Based upon the peer reviews of the program committee, 56 papers were accepted for the scientific research track including both oral and poster presentations. The number of attendees was 150.

From surveying the participants, the technical program including both oral and poster sessions were rated as high quality. Overall, the keynotes talks were considered excellent, even the best that many participants had ever heard. Participants remarked specifically that the combination of Prof. Huang and Prof. Jain was particularly interesting because they actively referred to each other's talks which created a more engaging and energetic atmosphere. The ACM MIR-FLICKR evaluation/benchmarking session was also frequently noted by the participants and was considered to be a very positive direction for the community. In particular, they noted that the field has a significant need for more carefully annotated scientific test sets.

Organizers and community members of the previous MIR, CARPE, and VSSN related workshops did ground breaking work and support for preparing MIR conference. Research communities and conferences require strong foundations and in our case we could draw from a rich history of related activities. The support and involvement of Kiyo Aizawa, Mark Zhang, and Alberto del Bimbo contributed significantly to the international and cross-community appeal of this meeting.

We are also grateful to all of the members of the program committee and the additional reviewers. Their reviews of the submissions played a pivotal role in the quality of the conference. Moreover, Erwin Bakker and Alberto del Bimbo did an excellent job in organizing the enormous double-blind peer review and paper selection process. The paper review and decisions tasks were distributed between the program chairs to ensure no conflicts of interest. Mark Huiskes and Mark Zhang did excellent work in the critical mission of having the conference run smoothly.

2. Summary of SIGMM Sponsored and In-Cooperation Conferences and Workshops

In 2008, SIG MM had 17 in-cooperation conferences (at 0% financial sponsorship), and 3 sponsored conferences at varying degrees of financial sponsorship. We sponsored our main ACM Multimedia conference at 100% and NOSSDAV at 33.4%. In 2008, CIVR was added as a sponsored event at 50% sponsorship. Note, that although ACM MIR was a separate conference, it was budgeted jointly with ACM Multimedia 2008, since it was co-located with ACM Multimedia 2008. In 2011 CIVR and ACM MIR will merge as a strong International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, ICMR2011.

List of SIGMM In-cooperation conferences:

• E-Forensics08: First International Conference on Forensic Applications and Techniques in Telecommunications, Information and Multimedia January 2008, Adelaide, Australia
• MMM08: MultiMedia Modeling (MMM) International Conference January, 2008, Kyoto, Japan
• MMCN'08: Multimedia Computing and Networking, January 2008, San Jose CA USA
• AVI 2008: The International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, May 2008, Naples, Italy
• INFOSCALE08: The Third International ICST Conference on Scalable Information June 2008, Vico Equense, Italy
• EuroITV08: European Conference on Interactive Television, July 2008, Salzburg, Austria
• MobiMedia08: Fourth International Mobile Multimedia Communications, July 2008, Oulu, Finland
• QShine08: 5th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness, July 2008, Hong Kong
• ICDSC '08: International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, September 2008, Palo Alto, USA
• EATIS08:Euro American Conference on Telematics and Information Systems , September, 2008, Aracaju, Brazil
• MM&Sec'08:Multimedia and Security Workshop, September 2008, Oxford, UK
• MindTrek08, October2008, Tampere, Finland
• NetGames08: Network and Systems Support for Games, October 2008, Worcester, USA
• WebMedia08: 14th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and Web Systems, October2008,VilaVelha,Brazil
• MoMM08: 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing and Multimedia, November 2008, Linz, Austria
• SAMT08: 3rd International Conference on Semantics and Digital Media Technology,December2008,Koblenz,Germany

List of SIGMM Sponsored conferences

• NOSSDAV'08: The 18th International Workshop on Network and Operating Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video, May 2008, Braunschweig Germany (SIGMM is 33.4%)
• CIVR'08 - International Conference on Content-based Image and Video Retrieval, July 2008, Niagara Falls, Canada (SIGMM is 50%)
• MM '08: International Conference on Multimedia 2008, October 2008, Vancouver, Canada (SIGMM is 100%)
• MIR'08: Multimedia Information Retrieval 2008, October 2008, Vancouver, Canada (budgeted together with MM'08).

3. Election of SIGMM Leadership

Until June 2009, the elected leadership of SIGMM was SIGMM Chair Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Vice Chair Wolfgang Effelsberg, SIGMM Conference Coordinator Nevenka Dimitrova. In Spring 2009, Prof. Ramesh Jain (former SIGMM chair) organized new elections of SIGMM executive committee. In June 2009, a new SIGMM leadership was elected by the SIGMM members for the 2009-2011 period and started its work in July 2009. The executive committee consists now of SIGMM Chair Klara Nahrstedt, SIGMM Vice Chair Rainer Lienhart, and SIGMM Conference Coordinator, Mohan Kankanhalli.

4. SIGMM Retreat

One and half days (October 26-27) prior to ACM Multimedia 2008, SIGMM leadership organized a retreat inviting leading multimedia researchers (40 researchers) to Vancouver to discuss the future of SIGMM, new initiatives, organization of the SIGMM, research, education efforts and industry/academic relationships and how SIGMM can support these initiatives.

During the first day (Sunday - half day) we discussed general issues of SIGMM such as (a) if we need to change bylaws and move from two years to three years election cycle for SIGMM leadership, (b) what new awards we should introduce in SIMM, (c) how one should best include arts track and exhibition, i.e., synchronize it with the technical program, (d) what new conferences should we start and go into sponsorship relationship, (e) how our SIGMM venues (SIGMM Records, TOMCCAP, MMSJ, SIGMM Web portal (magazine)) can best serve the community and what improvements can be make, and other issues.

In the afternoon of the first day, split into three break-out sessions (1) research directions in multimedia - Chairs: Nicolas Georganas and Wolfgang Effelsberg, (2) educational efforts in multimedia area - Chairs: Ralf Steinmetz and Mohan Kankanhalli, (3) industry/academia inter-relationship and what impact does academia has on industry and vice versa - Chairs: Larry Rowe and Wu-Chi Feng.

The second half day of the retreat, we met all together and discussed the outcomes of the break-out sessions. Several recommendations came out the break-out sessions and the previous discussions such as (a) establishment of a committee to study impact of academic results on industry and make recommendations how the inter-relation and impact can be improved/increased. (b) establishment of the educational director-at-large who will start collecting educational material on our SIGMM website and provide extensive educational material to the SIGMM community in the form of, e.g., survey of textbooks in multimedia area, survey of educational program in multimedia area, and other useful information for multimedia educators; (c) establishment of the art director-at large who will aim to better coordinate the art program and exhibition within ACM Multimedia Conference together with the technical organizational committee; (d) establishment of broader advisory SIGMM committee that would have advisory role to the SIGMM leadership. The advisory committee consists of the editors-in-chiefs of SIGMM venues (TOMCCAP, MMSJ, SIGMM Records, SIGMM Web portal (magazine)), the previous SIGMM chair, one general co-chair of the currently in preparation of our premier ACM Multimedia conference, and the ACM program manager.

5. SIGMM Awards

In 2008, SIGMM Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications was approved by ACM and established to be given out once a year at the premier SIGMM Conference, the ACM Multimedia. The awards committee was setup, consisting of Prof. Nicolas Georganas, Prof. Wolfgang Effelsberg (EC Member), and Dr. Hong-Jiang Zhang. The first winner of this award was Prof. Ralf Steinmetz from Technical University Darmstadt, Germany for his seminal achievements in the area of multimedia synchronization and networks. The award was awarded at the ACM Multimedia 2008 in Vancouver. Our second winner chosen by the awards committee in 2009 is Dr. Lawrence Rowe and he will awarded this SIGMM award in October 2009 in Beijing, China at the ACM Multimedia 2009.

In 2009, the SIGMM Executive Committee (EC) applied for a new SIGMM Award for Best PhD Thesis in the area of Multimedia. The award was approved by ACM in June 2009. The first award will be given out in 2010 at the ACM Multimedia 2010. We are in process of establishing an award process and awards committee to be put in place by January 1, 2010 when the deadline for nominations is coming. The award was already advertised at NOSSDAV 2009 and will be broadly advertised at ACM Multimedia 2009 as well as in SIGMM venues.

6. SIGMM Records

In January 2008, we have started a new service, the SIGMM e-newsletter for SIGMM members only. This e-ewsletter was discussed at the SIGMM retreat and it was recommended that (a) we rename the e-newsletter to SIGMM Records publication, and (b) we aim to make it a citable/searchable publication to be placed in the ACM Digital Library (DL). Starting January 2009, Prof. Carsten Griwodz (Editor-in-Chief) has achieved the goal and the SIGMM Records is now in the ACM DL and citable/searchable/available to other researchers. This was very much approved by the SIGMM community. The SIGMM Records is very successful due to the high quality management of the EiC and the editorial team. The SIGMM Records are also archived at the SIGMM Web Site http://www.sigmm.org/sigmmpublications.

7. SIGMM Website/Web-Magazine

In 2008-2009, the www.sigmm.org went through further changes and SIGMM supported a staff person to assist Prof. Balakrishnan Prabhakaran (editor-in-chief of the SIGMM Web Magazine) in maintenance of the SIGMM webserver. Several changes happen:

• we have a new logo that is much more appropriate to the SIG Multimedia community including multimedia symbols;
• new look-and-feel of the website was provided,
• blogging is possible;
• information about awards, SIGMM records, status reports, SIGMM retreat slides have been posted and shared with the SIGMM community.

Prof. Prabhakaran established a small editorial board where each editorial member has the responsibility for content at his/her webpage, jointly composing then the SIGMM Web Portal/Magazine. The SIGMM web magazine is a vibrant web portal and a valued resource for the SIGMM community.

8. Other SIGMM Services

1. ACM TOMCCAP (Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Processing): This journal is becoming the premier multimedia journal as various statistics show where high quality research results are being published. Prof. Nicolas Georganas, the Editor-in-Chief, has truly brought this young journal to very high quality in a very short time of its existence. At this point, we have put together a search committee, led by Prof. Wolfgang Effelsberg, to search for a new editor-in-chief since Prof. Georganas term (5 years) is expiring in December 2009. The Call for Nominations is going into various SIGMM venues to advertise for this new position.
2. SIGMM Conference Presentation Efforts: At ACM Multimedia 2008, we have recorded keynote speakers as well as presentations of the four long papers that competed for the best paper award. We have established a position inside of the ACM Multimedia organization committee, the preservation chair. In ACM Multimedia 2008, Dr. Matthias Hollick was the presentation chair. All videos have been submitted to ACM Digital Library.
3. Preservation Efforts for SIGMM Conference Websites: We have asked the ACM Multimedia 2009 web-master to use the SIGMM webserver to host the website so that we can start with a systematic preservation. Other websites of previous ACM Multimedia conference are being ported currently to SIGMM web portal for presentation purposes.
4. CACM Efforts: We have established a committee, consisting of the program chairs of SIGMM sponsored conferences in 2008 to come up with a best paper in our conferences to be submitted to CACM for selection. By the end of the year 2008, we have submitted one paper. The same process will be repeated this year.

9. Future Plans

During 2009-2010, we are/will be implementing recommendations from the SIGMM retreat 2008 and anticipate a lively educational initiatives as well as a much stronger understanding of the impact of academia on industry in 2009-2010.

In 2010, we will give out the first "Best PhD Thesis" award, hence new committee will be established to determine the winner.

In February 2010, we are starting a new SIGMM-sponsored conference MMSys in multimedia computing and networking, where the general chairs are going to be Prof. Ketan Mayer-Patel and Prof. Wu-chi Feng. This conference is replacing a SPIE MMCN (Multimedia Computing and networking) conference that used to attract SIGMM multimedia systems and networking community. MMCN ceased to exist in 2009 and will be replaced by ACM MMSys which should have a much higher quality and recognition by the SIGMM community and the general systems and networking community.

Our SIGMM Web Portal will be further revised and improved including the presentation efforts of former ACM Multimedia Conference web pages.

We will move to three year cycle to determine the location of our premier ACM Multimedia conference. In 2010 we will invite bids not only for 2012 but also for 2013 and from there on, we will accept conference location bids in three-year cycle.

We are planning to revise our SIG bylaws and install three year cycle for the SIGMM EC members with maximum of two terms serving in each position.

10. Summary

June 2008-June 2009 has been a very strong year for ACM SIGMM. SIGMM has strengthen its mission to assist the multimedia community in their visibility and services. The 2008 SIGMM Retreat was extremely productive with very interactive and interesting recommendations that we have partially implemented in 2009 and are aiming with the new SIGMM leadership to implement in the coming year. We have sponsored exciting conferences such as the ACM Multimedia 2008, MIR 2008, NOSSDAV 2008 and CIVR 2008 which all were profitable and brought surplus to the SIGMM organization. The surplus is again returned back to the multimedia community via sponsoring the 2008 SIGMM Retreat and other SIGMM professional meetings benefiting SIGMM community, SIGMM Web Service, and SIGMM Award (2008, 2009 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award). We have established processes for the awards committees, established editorial board for SIGMM Web Magazine, strengthen the preservation process of our premier talks and also old ACM Multimedia web pages. We are bringing to the community a new award, the "Best PhD Thesis" that will be given first time 2010 during the ACM Multimedia 2010. We are also bring a new conference, the SIGMM-sponsored MMSys conference, to bring together multimedia system and networking researchers in 2010.

Appendix A: Organizing Committee of ACM Multimedia 2008

General Co-Chairs: Abdulmotaleb EL Saddik (Univ. of Ottawa); Son Vuong (Univ. of British Colombia)
Program Co-Chairs: Carsten Griwodz (Univ. of Oslo); Alberto Del Bimbo (Univ. degli Studi di Firenze); K. Selcuk Candan (Arizona State Univ.); Alejandro Jaimes (Telefonica R&D, Madrid, Spain)
Short Paper Co-Chairs: Gopal S Pingali (IBM, Watson); Changsheng Xu (CAS, China); Shervin Shirmohammadi (Univ. of Ottawa)
Workshop Co-Chairs: Max Mühlhäuser (TUD, Germany); Dulce Ponceleon (IBM, Almaden)
Tutorial Chair: Roger Zimmerman (NUS, Singapore)
Publicity Co-Chairs: Yong Rui (Microsoft, China); Markus Kampmann (Ericsson, Sweden); Jiebo Luo (Kodak Research Lab, USA); Wolfgang Effelsberg (Univ. of Mannheim)
Technical Demo Co-Chairs: Pål Halvorsen (Univ.of Oslo); Anup Basu (Univ. of Alberta)
Proceedings Chair: Balakrishnan Prabhakaran (Univ. of Texas at Dallas)
Panel Co-Chairs: Suzanne Boll (Univ.of Oldenburg); Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood (IBM, Almaden)
Finance Chair: Azzedine Boukerche (Univ. of Ottawa)
Doctorial Symposium Co-Chairs: Hari Sundaram (Arizona State Univ); Kiyoharu Aizawa (University of Tokyo)
Sponsoring Co-Chairs: Panos Nasiopoulos (Univ. of British Columbia); Victor Leung (Univ. of British Columbia)
Brave New Topics Co-Chairs: Ling Guan Ryerson University); Zhengyou Zhang (Microsoft Research)
Travel Grant Co-Chairs: Christoph Rensing (HTTC); Shueng-Han Gary Chan (Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology)
Interactive Art Program Co-Chairs: FrankNack (Univ. Claude Bernard Lyon); Andruid Kerne (Texas A&M University); Ron Wakarry (Simon Fraser University)
Web Co-Chairs: Pradeep K. Atrey (Univ. of Winnipeg); Atif Alamri (Univ. of Ottawa)
Video Program Co-Chairs: Thomas Haenselmann (Univ. of Mannheim); Michael Smith
History Preservation Chair: Matthias Hollick (TU Darmstadt)
Open Source Competition Co-Chairs: Oliver Heckman (Google); Arnd Steinmetz (Fachhochschule Darmstadt)
Registration Chair: Rosa Iglesias (Ikerlan Research Centre)
Local Arrangement Chair: Charles (Buck) Krasic (Univ. of British Colombia)
SIGMM Chair: Klara Nahrstedt (Univ. of Illinois)
SIGMM Director of Conferences: Nevenka Dimitrova (Philips)

Appendix B: ACM Multimedia 2008 Program