Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia

Abstract

Welcome all of you to join ACM Multimedia 2021, the 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia. ACM Multimedia is the premier international conference series in the area of multimedia within the field of computer science. Since 1993, ACM Multimedia has been bringing together worldwide researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present their innovative research and to discuss recent advancements in multimedia. Due to the continuous influence of COVID-19 all over the world since the end of 2019, the traditional onsite international conferences have to move to online mode. Notably, the last year ACM Multimedia conference 2020, has been successfully held totally online for the first time in history. During the online conference in the last year, face-to-face gatherings had been replaced by all-hands live sessions, parallel live question-answering (Q&A) sessions, and presentations from the authors via pre-recorded videos. This would be a reasonable solution to hold such a large-scale meeting during the COVID-19 period. Fortunately, the good epidemic prevention effect in China allows us to consider a more appropriate hybrid form to hold the conference onsite and online jointly. Our vision is to enrich the interaction of attendees all over the world via both physically face-to-face and virtually online fashions. The hybrid conference this year indeed brings greater challenges for organization. Firstly, we need to choose an appropriate conference venue that can accommodate hundreds of attendees. We finally find a good place in the downtown of the Chengdu city, where the attendees will definitely have a pleasant conference trip. Secondly, unlike the presentation form of papers on the purely online conference last year, all the conference papers this year are expected to be presented more informatively to both onsite and online attendees. Therefore, we adopt the traditional onsite conference form and divide the papers to oral and poster sessions with live streaming in each conference room, encouraging the onsite attendees to present their work physically and online attendees to provide live talks. Besides, we will also build a web portable platform (both Apps and websites) to collect the pre-recoded videos and posters of all papers, which will facilitate all attendees to view these resources before and during the conference. Moreover, free poster printing service will be available during the conference to enable the attendees onsite to view the printed posters of the authors who cannot physically attend the conference, which is expected to further enrich their exchange on the research work. Besides, we will also build remote interaction with authors in Q&A sessions via Zoom meetings. We really expect both onsite and online attendees to take advantage of the onsite oral/poster session and Q&A sessions after studying as many as possible related papers to interact directly with the paper authors. During the paper submission period of this year conference, we have tackled various unprecedented challenges and extended paper submission deadlines to provide sufficient time for participated teams. Nonetheless, we still have received a record-breaking number of 1,942 valid submissions for the main conference tracks (1,698 for last year) with an overall acceptance rate of 27.9% (542 papers), covering all areas and subareas of multimedia. This year, the conference will also be organized with a large diversity of tracks. In addition to the main track, the conference has tracks devoted to brave new ideas, industrial track, reproducibility companion, multimedia grand challenge, open source competition, interactive arts, and to multimedia demos.