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SIGMM Statement on Open Participation
Dear Multimedia Colleagues,
We are writing to welcome the new SIGMM leaders assuming their posts on
July 1st. The new team includes Alan Smeaton as the Chair, Nicu Sebe as
the Vice Chair, and Gerald Friedland as the Conference Director. Each of
them is a pioneer researcher in the multimedia field and has been
actively contributing to the community. We are confident they will be
able to lead the SIGMM community to further success.
Looking back, we have made many exciting accomplishments. We have
organized new workshops and an award to recognize rising stars,
established vibrant local chapter activities, built up very healthy
financial capacity, continued to lead premiere conferences in
multimedia, and organized strategic planning events. ACMMM, with unique
innovative programs such as Open Source Software, Grand Challenges, and
Technical Demos, continues to be the conference with the highest impact
in multimedia. Our local chapter in Bay Area has organized an extremely
successful lecture series highlighting influential talks from industry
and academia leaders. The Rising Star Workshops in 2015 and 2016 have
helped promote success and vision of the next generation leaders.
Recently, the new SIGMM Records group (led by Pablo Cesar and others on
the team) have developed an exciting plan to revitalize our activities
on the social media.
Going forward, we have many opportunities and challenges. Multimedia is
at the core of today's technology renaissance. Our members are leading
the frontiers of research as well as industry applications. However,
other communities have also embraced multimedia issues in their scope.
How do we continue to keep SIGMM as the leading community that attracts
researchers, practitioners, and students to come and identify this as
their professional home? In addition, in a recent retreat, we adopted a
T-shaped vision striving to achieve strengths in both technical depth
and breadth. How do we continue to foster integrated research that takes
advantage of the strong pillars we have in key areas like content,
systems, human centered design, and others?
With the strong momentum we have established and the outstanding
leadership brought by the new team, we have great hope for our community
to continue the successful impact in research, education, service, and
innovation. We hope everyone will be able to extend their best efforts
to contribute to and take part in this wonderful community.
Best regards,
Shih-Fu, Rainer, and Nicu
