Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia

ACM Multimedia has traditionally been instrumental with its technical program to shape the field and give new directions for established conferences. Before the conference last year, the Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIG MM) Chair Larry Rowe organized a strategic retreat to assess the current state of multimedia research and suggest directions for future research. The major observation is that research in the past decade has significantly advanced hardware and software support for distributed multimedia applications and that future research should focus on identifying and delivering applications that impact users in the real-world. The retreat suggested the community focus on solving three grand challenges: 1) make authoring complex multimedia titles as easy as using a word processor or drawing program, 2) make interactions with remote people and environments nearly the same as interactions with local people and environments, and 3) make capturing, storing, finding, and using digital media an everyday occurrence in our computing environment. We hope that the discussions and conclusions of the retreat have influenced this year's program. This year we have quite a rich technical program including long papers, short papers, technical demonstrations, video program, panels, doctoral symposium, introducing brave new topics, open software competition, and the interactive art program. We are enthusiastic about the conference keynote speech by Gordon Bell, about the new relevance for multimedia when we record everything personal -- continuously. The technical program this year introduced a double blind review process. Each of the submitted 331 full (long) papers was reviewed by three reviewers. The technical program committee met on June 19, 2004 in New York. We gratefully acknowledge the technical program committee members and reviewers (see list later in the proceedings) for their important work. The review process culminated in acceptance of 55 papers: 30 in the Multimedia analysis, processing, and retrieval track (out of 166), 12 papers in the Multimedia networking and system support track (out of 82) and 13 papers in the Multimedia tools, end-systems, and applications track (out of 83). We would like to thank technical program chairs, Rainer Lienhart, Sue Moon and Angela Sasse for their hard and dedicated work. The short paper track chairs Svetha Venkatesh and Brian Bailey did an outstanding job this year. They received a record number of 158 papers and selected 71 papers for the final program. We owe a debt of gratitude to the conference track chairs for an amazing collection of events: to Yong Rui and Jon Crowcroft for a diverse and topical offering of tutorials, to Frank Nack for chairing and getting support for the video program, to Chitra Dorai and Tat-Seng Chua for expanding the Workshops program, to Michael Vernick and Jim Griffioen for a great selection of exciting demonstrations, to Hari Sundaram and Paal Halvorsen for an engaging doctoral symposium program, to Susanne Boll for rounding up people to debate in great panel sessions. Lynn Wilcox and Dick Bulterman did a splendid job on introducing the brave new topics track and we hope that this will invigorate the quest for new areas. Great thanks to the best open-source software competition chairs Ketan Mayer-Patel and Roger Zimmermann for establishing evaluation process and promoting a rewarding and high impact practice for the entire community to share the tangible output of our research.