ACM Multimedia is the premier conference in multimedia, a research field that discusses emerging computing methods from a perspective in which each medium — e.g. images, text, audio — is a strong component of the complete, integrated exchange of information. The multimedia community has a tradition of being able to handle big data, has been a pioneer in large scale evaluations and dataset creations, and is uniquely angled towards novel applications and cutting edge industrial challenges. As such the conference openly embraces new intellectual angles from both industry as well as academia and welcomes submissions from related fields, such as data science, HCI and signal processing.

ACM Multimedia 2021 calls for research papers presenting novel theoretical and algorithmic solutions addressing problems across the domain of multimedia and related applications. The conference also calls for papers presenting novel, thought-provoking ideas and promising (preliminary) results in realizing these ideas.

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 towards the page limit of 6 to 8 pages. Please note that there is no longer a 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.

The conference invites papers in four major themes of multimedia: Engagement, Experience, Systems and Understanding.

Theme: Engaging Users with Multimedia

The engagement of multimedia with society as a whole requires research that addresses how multimedia can be used to connect people with multimedia artifacts that meet their needs in a variety of contexts. The topic areas included under this theme include:

Emotional and Social Signals

This area focuses on the analysis of emotional, cognitive (e.g., brain-based) and interactive social behavior in the spectrum of individual to small group settings. It calls for novel contributions with a strong human-centered focus specializing in supporting or developing automated techniques for analyzing, processing, interpreting, synthesizing, or exploiting human social, affective and cognitive signals for multimedia applications.)

Multimedia Search and Recommendation

To engage user in information access, search and recommendation requires not only understanding of data but also user and context. This area calls for novel solutions for user-centric multimedia search and recommendations, in either automatic or interactive mode, with topics ranging from optimization, user intent prediction, to personalized, collaborative or exploratory algorithms. (Note: Topics focusing primarily on indexing and scalability should be submitted to “Multimedia systems: Data Systems indexing and management”)

Summarization, Analytics, and Storytelling

The information underlying multimedia is by nature multi-perspective. Allowing efficient multi-perspective and context-adaptive information access remains an open problem. This area calls for new and novel solutions that can compose, link, edit and summarize multimedia data into a compact but insightful, enjoyable and multi-perspective presentation to facilitate tasks such as multimedia analytics, decision making, searching and browsing.

Theme: Experience

One of the core tenants of our research community is that multimedia data contributes to the user experience in a rich and meaningful manner. The topics organized under this theme are concerned with innovative uses of multimedia to enhance the user experience, how this experience is manifested in specific domains, and metrics for qualitatively and quantitatively measuring that experience in useful and meaningful ways. Specific topic areas addressed this year include:

Interactions and Quality of Experience

Papers under this topic area should address human-centered issues. Topics include (i) novel interaction techniques and modalities for accessing, authoring, and consuming multimedia data, (ii) design and implementation of novel interactive media (iii) new methodologies, models, and metrics to understand and/or measure multimedia quality of experience.

Art and Culture

Papers under this topic area should develop techniques that enable effective engagement of the public with art and other forms of cultural expression, balancing between sophisticated computational/engineering techniques and artistic / cultural purposes. Topics include (i) digital artworks, including hybrid physical digital installations; dynamic, generative, and interactive multimedia artworks; (ii) computational tools to support creativity, cultural preservation, and curation.

Multimedia Applications

Papers under this topic area should push the envelope of how multimedia can be used to improve the user experience in a rich and meaningful manner. We solicit papers that design, implement, and evaluate applications that employ multimedia data in surprising new ways or in application scenarios that user experience remains challenging based on today’s start-of-the-art, such as immersive telepresence, distance education.

Theme: Multimedia Systems

Research in multimedia systems is generally concerned with understanding fundamental tradeoffs between competing resource requirements, developing practical techniques and heuristics for realizing complex optimization and allocation strategies, and demonstrating innovative mechanisms and frameworks for building large-scale multimedia applications. Within this theme, we have focussed on three target topic areas:

Systems and Middleware

This area seeks novel contributions that address performance issues in one of the systems components. Topics include operating systems, mobile systems, storage systems, distributed systems, programming systems and abstractions, and embedded systems. Papers must establish performance improvement or non-trivial tradeoffs through integration of multiple systems components or enhancing one of the system components.

Transport and Delivery

Papers under this topic area should address improvement to multimedia transport and delivery mechanisms over a computer network. Topics include network protocol enhancement, supporting multimedia data with network mechanisms such as SDN and NFV, in-network content placement.

Data Systems Management and Indexing

Papers under this topic area should address performance issues related to data management and indexing to support multimedia access at a large scale, including browsing, searching, recommendation, analysis, processing, and mining. Topics include scalable systems and indexing techniques that support multimedia access and analytics.

Theme: Understanding Multimedia Content

Multimedia data types by their very nature are complex and often involve intertwined instances of different kinds of information. We can leverage this multi-modal perspective in order to extract meaning and understanding of the world, often with surprising results. Specific topics addressed this year include:

Multimodal Fusion and Embedding

In the real world, some problems are addressable only through a combination of multiple media and/or modalities. This area seeks new insights and solutions of how multi-perspective media information should be fused and embedded for novel problems as well as innovative systems.

Vision and Language

Recent research have driven the merging of vision and language in different ways, for example, captioning, question-answering, multi-modal chatbots. This area seeks new solutions and results that are specific to the problems of combining or bridging vision and language.

Media Interpretation

This area seeks novel processing of media-related information in any form that can lead to new ways of interpreting multimedia content. Examples include processing of visual, audio, music, language, speech, or other modalities, for interpretation, knowledge inference, and understanding.