Multimedia Systems – The Conference Series

Upcoming Event

ACM MMSys 2014 is over. See you in Portland next year, for ACM MMSys 2015!

MMSys Mission

We believe it is important to have a full, top-tier conference that focuses specifically on multimedia systems research. We want to reach out to those researchers who primarily identify themselves as part of more “traditional” systems communities such as networking, operating systems, databases, and real-time systems but for whom multimedia applications are a driving problem. The conferences in each of these separate systems communities routinely contain tracks and sessions for multimedia-driven research. That our field has been so widely integrated back into these other communities is, in fact, a testament to the success of SIG Multimedia as a community. What was missing, however, was a longitudinal view of multimedia systems research that cut across these traditional system boundaries. While the systems track of our flagship conference ACM Multimedia helps to serve in this role, participation by multimedia systems researchers who are not SIGMM members has not been as strong as we would like. By holding a conference that concentrates on these systems issues, we are hoping to better target the research interests of these communities of researchers. Hopefully we can also inspire them to value and participate in the even broader holistic view that our flagship conference provides.

MMSys History

MMSys was born as a replacement for MMCN which had been held each January as part of SPIE’s Electronic Imaging (EI). While MMCN served our community well in the past, several severe weaknesses were beginning to take their toll. MMCN was the only EI sub-conference that required full paper submissions and had a competitive acceptance rate. The other EI sub-conferences are abstract-only submissions with reasonably high acceptance rates. Increasingly this became problematic as people familiar with the other sub-conferences assumed that MMCN was also a high-acceptance rate, abstract-only meeting. Junior faculty, in particular, were constantly having to educate tenure review committees about how MMCN was different. Furthermore, MMCN is not indexed by or incorporated into the ACM Digital Library.

After having had great success with MMSys in 2010, 2011, and 2012, MMSys has fully established itself and is ready to grow again. In particular, the colocation of MMSys 2012 and the MoVid 2012 workshop proved to be quite successful and the executive committees for both events have agreed to make this association permanent going forward. Furthermore, we are excited to add the NOSSDAV workshop as a permanently co-located event starting in 2013. NOSSDAV (http://www.nossdav.org) is one of the longest running workshops in multimedia computing with an illustrious history of fostering early work-in-progress and exciting “out of the box” ideas and research directions. This constellation of meetings are all sponsored by SIGMM and thus enjoy the benefits of the digital library and access to SIG Services. Each component will retain its own independent program committee and will be published within the digital library as a distinct and separate proceedings. This will allow each of the three events to retain its focus and culture while providing significant logistical benefits to both organizers and participants.

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