Editorial

Editorial

Dear Member of the SIGMM Community,

Welcome to the fourth issue of the ACM SIG Multimedia Records!

In this newsletter we offer you a new kind of article. Based on an initiative by Mr. Mu from Lancaster University, we interviewed several video quality experts. Those of you who subscribe to SIGMM's goal of evaluating research in terms quality-of-experience will hopefully find the experts' insights valuable.

In line with this topic, we refer also to 3 items of open material in this issue that may be helpful to SIGMM members who want to use video coding or evaluated video quality.

In the established second main section of this newsletter, PhD theses are introduced. Summaries from five theses are included in this issue, and for the first time, we have included a summary of a thesis that is not written in English. We believe that this makes sense because we are an international community and surely, if you can't read Farsi, you can look for Dr. Hariri's papers or contact her directly.

This issue includes also a reminder of the best PhD thesis award. Remember that the deadline is on January 3rd, 2010. For most of you, this will only be a reminder, but you have to hurry if you still want to submit. Another announcement is concerned with the establishment of the ACM Multimedia Conference Review Committee. Its task and charter are described in this issue. If you care about the quality of SIGMM's flagship conference, you should read about it and provide your input. Furthermore, an announcement presents the SIGMM educational portal that has gone online of the SIGMM's own web pages. This will only thrive with your participation, so take a look. And finally, we can announce that back issues of the Records themselves can now be accessed through the ACM Digital Library in the newsletters sections.

We wish you good reading with this latest issue of the SIGMM Records, and hope that you have a Happy and Successful New Year 2010!

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