ACM Multimedia Conference Spotlights Latest Innovations and Scientific Advances

Global Conference Includes New Research on Social Media Analysis, Robotics, Internet of Things, and More

New York, October 6, 2016 —The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) will hold its annual ACM Multimedia Conference in Amsterdam from October 15-19, 2016. Now in its 24th year, the ACM Multimedia Conference has become the premier venue to present scientific advancements and innovative industrial products in the multimedia field.

Multimedia computing research has grown considerably during the past two decades. Hot research areas include analysis of large image and video collections, social media research, multimodal human-computer interaction, computer vision, and computer graphics, among many other subjects. “We are only beginning to explore the potential applications of multimedia computing,” explains General Conference Co-chair Alan Hanjalic of the Delft University of Technology.  “The program we’ve put together for ACM Multimedia 2016 reflects the wide range of research being done in this field. We are especially excited that, for the first time, this year’s conference will feature a multimedia technology expo designed to further stimulate outreach to the non-academic world.”

ACM Multimedia 2016 highlights include:

Keynote Addresses

Dirk Helbing, ETH Zurich:  “A digital world to thrive in – How the Internet of Things can make the ‘invisible hand’ work”
Managing data-rich societies wisely and reaching sustainable development are among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. We are faced with existential threats and huge opportunities. If we don’t act now, large parts of our society will not be able to economically benefit from the digital revolution. This could lead to mass unemployment and social unrest. It is time to create the right framework for the digital society to come.

Jack van Wijk, Eindhoven University of Technology:  “Visual Analytics for Multimedia: Challenges and Opportunities”
Understanding huge multimedia collections is a big challenge. Given a set of hundreds of thousands or millions of images, how to understand its contents and how to find images that are relevant for the task at hand? The use of a tight integration of automated methods, visualization and interaction, known as visual analytics, is probably the only way to go, combining the strengths of man and machine. An overview of trends in data visualization and visual analytics is given, and examples of recent work in multimedia analytics are presented.

Select Papers:

  • “Patterns of Free-form Web Curation: Visual Thinking and Expression of Relationships”

  • “Are Safer Looking Neighborhoods More Lively? A Multimodal Investigation into Urban Life”

  • “Deep-based Ingredient Recognition for Cooking Recipe Retrieval”

  • “Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms”

  • “Facial Age Estimation Using Robust Label Distribution”

  • “What Makes a Good Movie Trailer? Interpretation from Simultaneous EEG and Eyetracker Recording”

  • “Enabling My Robot to Play Pictionary: Recurrent Neural Networks for Sketch Recognition”

The Rising Stars Symposium
Inaugurated in 2015, the symposium will highlight the plenary presentations of six selected Rising Star SIGMM members on their vision and research achievements. Presenters include:

  • Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Opportunities and Challenges of Social Media in Personal and Societal Well-Being”

  • Hayley Hung, TU Delft, “Being Moved by Motion: How Social Science Inspires Multimedia Analysis in the Wild”

  • Xirong Li, Renmin University of China, “Tag Embeddings for Multimedia Retrieval and Description”

  • Cynthia Liem, TU Delft, “Purpose and Repurpose: Lessons from the Concert Stage”

  • Judith Redi, TU Delft and CWI, “Towards ‘Wow!’ Multimedia Quality of Experience: if you can measure it, you can achieve it”

  • Ansgar Scherp, ZBW-Leibniz-Information Centre for Economics and Kiel University, “About Multimedia Presentation Generation and Multimedia Metadata: From Synthesis to Analysis, and Back?”

Awards
Three prestigious awards from ACM SIGMM will be presented at the conference, including:

  • Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, to Alberto del Bimbo

  • 2016 ACM SIGMM Rising Star Award, to Bart Thomee

  • 2016 SIGMM Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award, to Christoph Kofler

Click here for full conference program.

About SIGMM

SIGMM is ACM’s Special Interest Group on Multimedia—the community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building next-generation technologies and applications around multimedia. SIGMM hosts several vibrant premiere conferences including ACM Multimedia (with 600+ participants annually), ICMR on multimedia retrieval, and MMSys on multimedia systems. The community also takes pride in its publications including the flagship journal ACM TOMCCAP and the affiliated Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ).

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Contact:
Jim Ormond
ACM
212-626-0505
[email protected]

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