ACM SIGMM Call for Funding for Special Initiatives 2026

Dear Colleagues,

The ACM SIGMM (Special Interest Group in Multimedia) provides a forum for researchers,engineers,and practitioners in all aspects of multimedia computing, communication, storage, and applications. We do this through our sponsorship and organisation of conferences and workshops, supporting student travel to such events and discounted registrations.. We also maintain regional chapters, recognize excellence and achievement through an awards scheme and  inform the community of our activities through the SIGMM Records and dedicated mailing lists.

The SIGMM Executives invite applications for funding of new initiatives. These initiatives should focus on one, or more, of the following:

- building on SIGMM’s excellence and strengths;

- nurturing new talent in the SIGMM community;

- addressing weakness(es) in the SIGMM community and in SIGMM activities.

The fund can support auditable expenses incurred and necessary for the completion of the initiative but will not support student travel to SIGMM-sponsored events as this is already covered by a centralised SIGMM funding scheme.  

Proposals will be evaluated based on impact and contribution to the SIGMM community, and cost-effectiveness of the proposed budget. The recipients of funding will be chosen by a selection committee composed of SIGMM Executives, who make the final decision. SIGMM will preferentially fund, but will not be limited to, special projects on Embodied & Multimodal AI for Human Experience, Multimodal Foundation Models & Multimedia Systems at Scale and Creative Multimodal AI applications and systems.  Submissions are restricted to SIGMM members (information on joining SIGMM can be found at https://www.acm.org/special-interest-groups/sigs/sigmm).

Proposals must be submitted in PDF format and should not exceed 2 pages.

Submissions should be sent by email to the SIGMM Chair Abdulmotaleb El Saddik at elsaddik@uottawa.ca  and to SIGMM Vice-Chair Elisa Ricci at e.ricci@unitn.it.

An initial selection will be made from submissions made on or before a closing date of Friday 28 February 2026.  For informal enquiries contact SIGMM Vice-Chair e.ricci@unitn.it.  

Thanks,

Elisa Ricci, Vice-Chair of ACM SIGMM, on behalf of SIGMM Executives