ACM Multimedia Conference Review Committee

ACM Multimedia Conference Review Committee

 Dear SIGMM Members,

our flagship conference, the ACM Multimedia, has now existed for existed for 17 years. And still, the conference organization is changing every year. With an approach that puts new chairs and entirely new organizing committees in charge every year in a bidding process, ACM Multimedia is highly dynamic. However, this dynamicity comes with major downsides. Every committee makes changes, and because continuity is not guaranteed, good changes do often get lost, while bad ones persist. An institutional memory is missing.

The chairs of SIGMM have decided on the establishment of an ACM Multimedia Conference Review Committee that should improve this situation. The committee will consist of the following members:

1. Tat-Seng Chua (chuats@comp.nus.edu.sg) [CHAIR]

2. Nicu Sebe (sebe@disi.unitn.it)

3. B. Prabhakaran (bprabhakaran@utdallas.edu)

4. Hari Sundaram (Hari.Sundaram@asu.edu)

5. Qi Tian (qitian@cs.utsa.edu)

6. Chang Wen Chen (chencw@buffalo.edu)

7. Susanne Boll (susanne.boll@informatik.uni-oldenburg.de)

The scope of this committee's work is outlined in detail below. If you have any suggestions or feedback for improving the ACM Multimedia Conference, please send it to any one of the committee members.

Thank you,

Mohan Kankanhalli (ACM SIGMM Director of Conferences)

Scope of the Committee Work:

The committee will do a comprehensive review of the ACM Multimedia Conference series. The aspects to be considered will include:

1. Conference Steering Committee for Institutional Memory

   • a decision making body: scope of its work like evaluation of bids, advice on organization etc

   • who should be members and term-length

   • balance of experience and youth

   • responsible for documentation of experience?

2. Outlining of the Conference Bidding Process

   • timeline of bidding process

   • essential info in a bid document

   • who decides on the bid and how

3. Organizing and Program Committee

   • qualifications to serve on the committees (for General Chairs, Program Chairs, Other Chairs and PC Members)

   • how to leverage on experience of past organizers?

4. Conference Program

   • should there be tracks or areas?

   • how should new areas be incorporated?

5. Review Process

   • two tier Program Committee or single tier

   • amount of blindness in reviews

   • reviewing guidelines for reviews and meta-reviews

   • rebuttal process

   • program committee meeting (physical or online)

6. Program Structure

   • single or multiple tracks

   • panels, brave new topics, software, demos, videos, art

   • workshops, tutorials

7. Financial

   • how to make the conference affordable without sacrificing quality

   • how to increase student participation

   • how to increase industry participation and support

8. Miscellaneous

   • archival of conference knowledge and experience on SIGMM website: online Conference Handbook

   • any other relevant aspect of the conference

Timeline:

• Sep 01, 2010: Report Due

• Sep-Oct 2010: Circulation of report to all SIGMM Members for feedback

• Oct 28, 2010: Presentation of Report at ACM Multimedia 2010

• Nov 15, 2010: Final Report Due

• Dec 01, 2010: Recommendations to be adopted by SIGMM Executive Committee

• Dec 01, 2010: Accepted Recommendations to be implemented beginning with ACM Multimedia 2011