MM

Welcome to the sixteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2008), held October 27-31, 2008 at the Pan Pacific Hotel in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Vancouver, situated on Canada's east coast, enjoys a milder climate than much of Canada. As hosts to the 2010 winter Olympics, it boasts a plethora of sporting facilities, as well as ample opportunities for outdoor recreation with 3200 acres of parks and 11 miles of beaches. The North Shore Mountains are a 30 minute drive away offering skiing or mountain biking depending on the seasons. The city also features an art gallery with 7900 items valued over $100 million with many items by Emily Carr. In addition to Vancouver museum, there is a museum of Anthropology and a maritime museum, as well as the H.R. Macmillan Space Centre. On Granville St, there is an entertainment district with a vibrant nightlife.

ACM Multimedia is the premier annual professional meeting for communicating the state-of-the-art in multimedia research, technology, and art. As in previous years, starting with the first ACM Multimedia conference in 1993, the conference seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, and government who are interested in exploring and exploiting new and multiple media to create new capabilities for human expression, communication, collaboration, and interaction.

The pervasive use of multimedia has permeated into almost every aspect of our life. This is reflected in a wide variety of programs incorporated into the conference. The conference features the usual high-quality technical paper presentations, short poster paper presentations, doctoral symposium for senior graduate students, brave-new emerging topics, as well as tutorials and workshops in various areas. One key aspect of this conference that is different from most other academic conferences is its emphasis on systems and applications. To this end, the conference also includes technical demonstrations of research prototypes and systems, open software competition, video demonstration of concepts and applications, as well as interactive arts which includes an exhibition of multimedia art. The interactive arts program, started in ACM MM 2004, is well integrated into the main activity of the conference this year.

The overall conference encompasses three major parts: interesting tutorials on Monday, October 27, an exciting three-day main conference on Tuesday through Thursday, October 28-30, and a set of workshops in hot multimedia areas on October 31. This year we are also holding the first ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval on October 30-31 in conjunction with ACM Multimedia. The Content, Applications, Systems, and Multimedia Interactions tracks received 280 long paper submissions (109 in Content, 84 in Applications, 50 in Systems, and 37 in Multimedia Interactions). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a single-blind review process. The program committee met on June 20, 2008 in Darmstadt, Germany to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 56 long papers: 23 in the Content track, 16 in the Applications track, 9 in the Systems track, and 8 in the Multimedia Interactions track. This represents an acceptance rate of 20 percent.

The short paper program received 236 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 80 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 33 percent. These short papers will be presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year's fifth version of the Interactive Arts Program will consist of includes long and short papers as well as an art exhibition to be held at the Science World British Columbia.