IEEE Signal Processing Society Summer School on “Social Media Processing” University of Technology, Sydney Sydney, Australia July 2 – 6, 2012 WEB: http://www.icme2012.org/S3P/index.php APPLICATION DEADLINE: July 4, 2012 http://www.icme2012.org/S3P/Registration_index.php MOTIVATIONS AND DESCRIPTION The past decade witnesses the emergence and popularity of online social websites, blogs, instant messaging systems, and media-sharing networks, where millions of actively interact with each other and expand their social circles. Such social networks bring new experience to users, and profoundly change the way we create, share and consume multimedia content. These trends also pose new challenges to the effective management of the resulting avalanche of multimedia content that people create, share and distribute over networks. In addition, users demand personalized services to meet their individual needs. These trends also raise new challenges related to security and privacy issues. This is an interdisciplinary research area covering multimedia signal processing, social signal processing, information science, sociology, psychology, and economics. The Seasonal School on Social Media Processing is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society Seasonal School in Signal Processing (S3P) Program under the auspices of the IEEE SPS Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP TC) in coordination with the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 9-12 July 2012 The Seasonal School aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in this emerging research field, to provide graduate students, early stage researchers and practitioners a platform to interact with international and local researchers, and to engage local chapters in membership development and educational activities. This seasonal school will cover the following topics in social media processing: 1) multimedia social network analysis and user behavior modeling; 2) multimedia data mining and retrieval in social context; 3) multimedia communication and networking in social context; and 4) trust, privacy and security in social networks. APPLICATION The school will be open to graduate students, Ph.D. students, post-docs, young researchers, senior researchers and practitioners. Both academic and industrial professionals are encouraged to apply: http://www.icme2012.org/S3P/Registration_index.php LOCATION Sydney has the largest population among all Australian cities, and ranks as the 6^th most livable city in the world by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. Millions of international tourists visit Sydney each year, and the most famous attractions are the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There are also many national parks in the metropolitan area of Sydney, including the Royal National Park, the second oldest national park in the world. On the west border of Sydney is the Greater Blue Mountains Area, a World Heritage site; and along the Pacific Ocean coastline are the famous Sydney’s beaches that attract visitors all year round, including the internationally renowned Bondi and Manly beaches. The Seasonal School will be in the city campus of the University of Technology, Sydney, which is located in the heart of Sydney right by Central Station, the heart of Sydney's transport network. More detailed local information is available on http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/community/seasonal-schools/