Chair's message

Welcome to ACM 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. We host several vibrant premiere conferences including ACM Multimedia (currently in its 21^st anniversary 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). 

What do we mean by Multimedia? The conventional definition is handy but limited - the use of a variety of communicative media, including text, audio (sound and music), and visual (image, video, and graphics). Tremendous efforts and progresses have been made in SIGMM and other groups to enhance the quality and experience of a wide spectrum of multimedia applications, ranging from multimedia streaming, multimedia content analysis and retrieval, multimodal human computer interaction, multimedia storytelling, to multimodal telepresence. Now, in the age of Big Data characterized by Doug Laney’s 3V concept (volume, velocity, and variety), I believe the term multimedia has gone through a significant makeover. It now perfectly captures the last dimension, variety, of the Big Data idea. Multimedia represents the emphasis on large varieties of data types. Today, SIGMMers are conducting exciting research using a great variety of media, going far beyond the conventional types of audio and visual only. There are new sensors capturing information in novel contexts of mobile, game, health, biomedical, environment, and many others. In the dyadic relation between content and people, modern users also play a pivotal role through many innovative paradigms such as social media, crowdsourcing, human sensor network, citizen journalism, etc. Today, the definition of multimedia has been extended to be much broader and more inclusive, covering all of the data types mentioned above and more.

In short, we have entered a new era of multimedia research. In response to new challenges, SIGMMers have been very active in creating new ideas, such as the widely acclaimed Multimedia Grand Challenges at ACMMM, the high-energy industry exhibition/demo events at SIGMM conferences, the Video Olympics live search contest at ICMR, and the multimedia open source resource at the SIGMM portal. This is an exciting time to be immersed in the multimedia world. We invite you to join us to explore the wonderful opportunities lying ahead!

Shih-Fu Chang

SIGMM Chair