Open Source Software Competition - ACM Multimedia 2005

Open Source Software Competition

The open-source software competition is a recent addition to the ACM Multimedia program and 2005 will be our second year in running the competition.

The competition celebrates the invaluable contribution of researchers who advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, and other multimedia software. This kind of activity has been largely unrecognized in the past, although all of us can point to software generously provided by others which have formed the basis for our own research systems and experiments.

To qualify, software must be provided with source code and licensed in such a manner that it can be used free of charge in academic and research settings. For the competition, the software will be built from the sources. Submissions should be made in the form of a compressed zip or tar archive file and must include the following:

A text file named README.txt which summarizes the purpose of the software and its overall design and use.

A text file named INSTALL.txt which includes any and all instructions on building and installing the software and any system requirements. The judging committee will make a reasonable effort to build any submitted software. However, if we are unable to make the software run given a reasonable effort, we must unfortunately exclude it from the competition. Therefore, complete and clear build and install instructions are a crucial component of any submission.

Additionally, authors are highly encouraged to provide as much documentation as possible, including examples of how the provided software might be used. Entries may be made available to the research community via the ACM Multimedia SIG website and the judging committee may employ feedback from the community at large to help determine the winning entry. In order to encourage participation, non-winning entries will be encouraged to submit again in the future. Student-led efforts are particularly encouraged. Authors of the winning entry will be recognized formally at ACM Multimedia 2005, awarded a prize (to be announced), and invited to demonstrate their software as part of the conference demonstration program.

Submission Instructions

People interested in submitting an entry to the open source software competition should send the following information via email to the competition co-chairs Ketan Mayer-Patel (kmp@cs.unc.edu) and Ching Yung Lin (chingyung@us.ibm.com).

+	Names and affiliations of authors (indicate if student as well).
+	Title of submission.
+	Brief overview of submission (i.e., purpose, intended audience, main features, etc.)
+	Compressed tar or zip archive file with all source code and documentation.

Please note: If the archive file is more than 5MB in size, please place the file in a web accessible location and send a URL for that location instead.

If you have questions about what can or should be submitted, please feel free to address these questions to the competition co-chairs Ketan Mayer-Patel and/or Ching Yung Lin and we will do our best to answer. We are excited to be organizing this innovative and creative addition to the ACM Multimedia program. Please help us make this venture a continuing success by submitting your entry to the competition. We look forward to your participation.

Important Dates

29 Jul 2005	Deadline for submission
22 Aug 2005	Notification of Acceptance
29 Aug 2005	Camera Ready write-up due

Contacts

For any questions regarding the open software competition please email the co-chairs:

Ketan Mayer-Patel (UNC Chapel Hill) kmp@cs.unc.edu

Ching-Yung Lin (IBM, USA) chingyung@us.ibm.com