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We are pleased to welcome you to the eighteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia ACM Multimedia 2010, which is held from October 25 to 29, 2010 in Firenze, Italy, at Palazzo degli Affari and Palazzo dei Congressi.

ACM Multimedia is the premier annual scientific event dedicated to promoting multimedia research, technology and their future applications. It brings together researchers, practitioners and users from academia, industry, and government around the world. It highlights their efforts and creativity in improving the state of the art and moving multimedia applications into everyday life with an ultimate human experience. In particular, ACM Multimedia brings newest insights into the possibilities in delivering and composing digital content of multiple media objects with the highest level of quality; extracting useful semantic information to make media content easily searchable; developing new modalities for human-human and human-machine interaction in a natural way close to real-world experiences; supporting the full integration with the Internet to expand and make ubiquitous the communication between individuals. It also showcases novel ideas in augmenting individual experiences with additional information and data; encodings media to make their storage and delivery more effective; and empowering computers to manage large collection of media information.

Multimedia is a broad interdisciplinary field and ACM Multimedia Conference offers a vibrant forum for such a dynamic community. Researchers come to ACM Multimedia to exchange their experiences and know-hows, and discover inspirations and new opportunities for future research and collaboration. This makes ACM Multimedia a unique open experience where new fundamental concepts, practical tools and controversial ideas are discussed and debated. ACM Multimedia is also a very selective conference where only a small subset of submitted papers are accepted for presentation after a long and careful review process. In particular this year we had an extraordinary number of submissions for the Main Conference, in various components of Full and Short papers, Brave New Ideas, Art and Multimedia, Video, Demo, Industry Exhibit and Doctoral Symposium. Compared to the past years there was a more balanced distribution of full and short papers in the four main paper tracks, Systems (134), Content (333), Human-centered (150), Applications (357). This reflects the research trends in related fields and the increasing involvement of researchers in the development of applied research and novel applications. Acceptance rates were respectively 17% and 32% for Full and Short papers, 29% for Art and Multimedia, 64% for Demos. The review process was double-blind, involving an early review step to discard unqualified papers, thorough reviews by three independent reviewers appointed by the track Chairs, and the final meta-review done by senior researchers in the field. The Program Committee gathered in Amsterdam in June 2010, to discuss in length the review results, and decide the final list of the accepted papers.

We are pleased to highlight several significant aspects and innovative components in ACM Multimedia 2010. First, we aimed at an open, engaging forum stimulating discussion on multimedia research and applications. To this end, we introduced for the first time a Discussion Room session explicitly dedicated to open discussions on relevant subjects, where there are slots for short talks and sufficient time for free in-depth discussions between researchers on topics of interest. Second, we established a separate industry exhibition track to promote real-world solutions and applications from industry that demonstrate the impact of multimedia. Third, we also made efforts to encourage close interaction between multimedia researchers and artists. We introduced the Open Workshop on "Interactive Multimedia Computing for Creativity and Expression" facilitating constructive debate and collaboration between researchers and artists. Artistic communication with multimedia technologies also received a particular attention. We organized a great art exhibition at Palazzo Medici Riccardi (the old Medici's family house in the Italian Renaissance times) with renowned invited artists and newcomers who were selected by an international jury. Finally we stressed the relevance of multimedia innovation transfer to our societies and invited the European Commission Chorus+ Network to organize a Think Tank meeting on Social Media, during the Conference.

The Multimedia Grand Challenge, organized in Beijing for the first time, was continued with great enthusiasm this year and received a large number of submissions. Continuing last year's successful format, we asked industry leaders to define a set of problems that are interesting to the industry in a 2--5 year horizon, and engage researchers in multimedia to develop feasible solutions. We also continued the Open Source Competition for the development of useful and effective open source software for the community. We received this year an impressive number of good contributions.

The ACM Multimedia 2010 program has been complemented by Tutorials and Workshops that aim at putting into focus some of the most relevant subjects of investigation for the researchers in Multimedia. We received a huge number of proposals for both. In the end we selected 14 tutorials and 21 Workshops that are record numbers for a conference in our field.

Many companies from around the world have generously sponsored ACM Multimedia 2010. They include FXPAL, Google, HP Labs, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Yahoo!, Ricoh Innovations, Technicolor, and Cewe, which has impressively covered almost all major industry players in the multimedia field. Other generous support was kindly provided by Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, Provincia di Firenze, Comune di Firenze, Manning, O'Reilly, Callas and 3DLife EC projects, National Science Foundation (US), ACM and Università di Firenze.