A Couple of News Items from the MMSP TC

by Philip A. Chou (MMSP Liaison to E-Newsletter)

The Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP TC) promotes the advancement of multimedia signal processing technology with special emphasis on the interaction, coordination, synchronization, and joint processing of multimedia and multi-modality signals.  In the past, the TC has also served as a home for incubating new areas that do not fall neatly into areas covered by existing TCs.

Our TC organizes an annual MMSP Workshop, each loosely organized around a theme. MMSP 2010 was held in October in Saint-Malo, France, around the theme of entertainment, gaming, and virtual reality. The event was a great success with 93 papers presented and approximately 140 attendees. Plans are underway for the next workshop, MMSP 2011, which will be held in October in Hangzhou, China, around the theme of client-cloud multimedia computing. Paper submissions are due 15 April 2011. Please visit the MMSP 2011 web site for further information. MMSP 2012 will be held in Banff, Canada. Proposals for MMSP 2013 will be considered at the Hangzhou workshop; a call for proposals for MMSP 2013 will be sent out soon.

The MMSP TC is also directly involved in steering and organizing the technical program for the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), held annually in July under the sponsorship of four IEEE societies (Signal Processing, Computer, Communications, and Circuits and Systems). Recently ICME has been revamped with a highly selective acceptance rate of at most 15% for oral papers and an additional 15% for poster presentations. ICME 2011 will be held in Barcelona, Spain. Focused workshops are also an integral part of the conference. In conjunction with ICME 2011, members of the TC are organizing the Hot3D workshop, which encourages presentation of early stage, preliminary, and potentially disruptive technologies in 3D Multimedia. ICME 2012 will be held in Melbourne, Australia. A call for proposals for ICME 2013 and 2014 has been sent out; proposals will be considered at the Barcelona conference.

Of course, the MMSP TC is also heavily involved with ICASSP. At ICASSP 2011 in Prague, members of our Technical Directions subcommittee – Francesco de Natale, Eckehard Steinbach, and Enrico Magli – will provide our TC’s opinions on current trends and opportunities in multimedia signal processing. Our chair, Phil Chou, will give a plenary talk on Directions in Immersive Communication.

In January 2011, Anthony Vetro retired as Past-Chair, Oscar Au became Vice-Chair, and seven newly elected members started their terms: Dinei Florêncio, Alan Hanjalic, Alexander Loui, Fernando Pereira, Ricardo de Queiroz, Feng Wu, and H. Vicky Zhao. The TC thanks the following members whose terms expired in December 2010: John Apostolopoulos, Ken Rose, Anthony Vetro, and Min Wu. Our doors are always open to new Affiliate Members. Join here or visit the MMSP TC web site for more information.