MM

We are pleased to introduce to you to the Technical Program for the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia) 2017, which will take place in Mountain View, California, US in October 2017.

While adopting the best practices from previous ACM Multimedia conferences, this year we introduced new formats of the submissions and ensured the rigor of the review process to ensure an efficient and fair evaluation of all submissions in providing a high quality conference.

From 2017 on, the conference invites research papers of varying length from 6 to 8 pages, plus additional pages for the reference pages; i.e., the reference page(s) are not counted to the page limit of 6 to 8 pages. There is no longer the distinction between long and short papers but the authors may themselves decide on the appropriate length of the paper. All papers will undergo the same review process and review period.

In this year, a total of 22 areas of interest were grouped into 5 research themes, including a Systems and Applications Theme (covering Multimedia Systems and Middleware, Multimedia Transport and Delivery, Multimedia Telepresence and Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality, Mobile and Wearable Multimedia), an Experience Theme (covering Perceptual Multimedia, Ubiquituous Multimedia, Novel Interactions with Multimedia, Social, Emotional and Affective Multimedia, Multimedia Storytelling and Curation, Multimedia for Collaboration and Public Spaces), an Understanding Theme (covering Deep Learning for Multimedia, Multimodal/Multisensor Analysis and Description, Multimedia and Vision), and an Engagement Theme (covering Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture, Multimedia Search and Recommendation, Big Data, Digital Society, Multimedia Technology for Autonomous Vehicles). Comparing to the last year, we introduced the Novel Topics theme (covering Privacy Implications of Multimedia, Multimedia Data Collections, Multimedia in Data Science, New Fields in Multimedia) in order to embrace to the emerging topics in multimedia research.

Each research theme was overseen by one of this year's Technical Program Chairs. For each area of interest, a team of Area Chairs (ACs), ranging from one to seven members, was recruited to handle the paper review process. Any submissions co-authored by program chairs or area chairs were handled by in a separate Conflict-of-Interest (CoI) track led by the CoI program chair. In total, 87 ACs were appointed.

We have received a total of 684 paper submissions entered into the review process, where 101 submissions are co-authored by program chairs and/or area chairs and thus handled on a separate EasyChair installation.

During the review process, we aimed to have 4 high-quality reviews for each submission. We have recruited 608 program committee members to contribute their professional reviews to the submissions in a double-blind approach. On average, we received more than 3.3 reviews for each submission by the review deadline which enabled the ACs to write meta reviews and proposed initial recommendations before the TPC meetings.

This year we adopted a more distributed manner in holding the TPC meetings. Each program chair organized a one-day TPC meeting with the ACs s/he led some time in June. The emphasis of the TPC meeting was on borderline and controversial paper submissions. The discussions were detailed and intensive, taking into account all the available data, including reviews, the authors' advocates' investigations, the initial recommendations by the ACs and any reviews performed by ACs during the meeting.

Finally, the Program Committee accepted 189 out of 684 submissions, yielding an acceptance rate of 27.63%. Among the 189 accepted full papers, 49 are selected to give oral presentations on the conference, while the rest are arranged to present to conference attendees in a poster format. Also, the papers with poster presentations are scheduled to have a short pitch with videos in a dedicated pitch session.