2005 ICASSP Meeting, March 20, Philadelphia, USA.

Agenda for MMSP Technical Committee Meeting

Minutes for MMSP Technical Committee Meeting


Location: Marriot Room 305, Philadelphia, PA, ICASSP2005

Date and Time: March 20, 2005, 11:00 – 12:30 PM

Attended: Yu Hen Hu, Ingemar Cox, Jie Chen, Ling Guan, Nasir Memon, Shri Narayaran, 
Adriana Dumitras, Stefano Tubaro, Touradj Ebrahimi, Mihaela van der Schaas, Alexandros 
Eleftheriadis, Zhi Ding, Chang Wen Chen, Min Wu, (Guest): Tsuhan Chen, Sadoaki Furui, 
S. Y. Kung, Haitao Zheng, Xinhua Zhuang, Joern Ostermann, John A. Sorensen,


   1. Call to order (Hu)
   2. Roll call (Hu)
   3. Approval of Minutes of previous meeting (Hu)
   4. Report of TC Chair (Hu)
         1. Responsibility of individual TC members
         2. SPS award procedure changes

The award sub-committee will be charged to come up with a repository of all papers 
that fall within MMSP technical interests. A list of high quality papers will be 
selected based on reading of abstracts. Then after reading these papers, each member 
in the award subcommittee is required to identify up to 3 papers qualified for nomination. 
Every members in the TC as well as from SPS will be encouraged to nominate up to 3 papers 
from the eligible list. Each nomination should come with a one-paragraph explaining why 
this paper is worthy of awarded. The TC then will vote to select top candidates from the 
nominated list.

         1. Fellow nomination endorsement

TC members are encouraged to nominate qualified members for senior grade and fellow grade promotion.

         1. New member recruitment

A good source to identify qualified TC member candidates are authors of MMSP papers.

e. TC will meet during ICME 2005 and will be coordinated by Prof. Cox.

   1. ICME reports

ICME 2006 will be held in Toronto, CA. The budget is under revision.

   1. ICASSP reports
   2. MMSP 2004 (Mauro Barni) (As attached)
   3. MMSP 2005 (X. Zhuang)

The MMSP 2005 paper submission deadline has been postponed till May 8, 2005. The paper 
review web site has been set up.

The meeting hotel is now set to park hotel. Details can be found at the web site: http://www.ece.wisc.edu/~mmsptc/

   1. MMSP 2006 (Li Deng): Due to lack of time, Dr. Deng briefly reported that a new hotel 
with great facility is being evaluated.

   2. Discussion: During chair’s report, the issue of disappointing award nomination results 
has stimulated spirited discussion. It is generally agreed that it is difficult to separate 
the research interests of multimedia signal processing to other sub-fields of signal processing. 
Professor Ebrahimi proposed a new way of thinking: Instead of defining area, we should define 
the technical leaders who choose to publish their work in MMSP area. These translates to an 
effort to identify a pool of internationally well-known, highly regarded researchers and 
actively get them involved in MMSP activities, such as keynotes of MMSP workshop or ICME 
conference, to be candidates for award nominations, and invitation to MMTC membership, etc. 
The conclusion is that the TC chair will propose a plan to the TC in this regard.
   3. Next Meeting: ICME July 2005. TC Chair-elect, Professor I. Cox will preside the meeting 
in the absence of Yu Hen Hu, the current TC chair.
   4. Adjournment


Report about MMSP’04
March 2005
About the workshop

   1. The workshop was a great success from the point of view of

    * Number of submitted papers (about 400)
    * Quality of presented papers (of course this can not be quantified, it is just my 
impression and the impression of some of the attendees I spoke with)
    * Social quality: it seems to me that the degree of socialization was very good, people 
interacted a lot and had (I think) good discussions)
    * Economic: the final financial report will not be very different from the financial budget 
approved by IEEE. The surplus should be in line with the expected one, however I had to face 
some problems that delayed the financial closure of the workshop (see below)

Workshop closure

   1. I still have to close the workshop from a financial point of view. In fact the 
interbank services lost some pages of a fax that we sent them with the transaction details. 
It took a lot of time for us to realize this (they did not say anything to us), so when we 
finally resent the missing pages, the regular terms for collecting
the money was expired. Then we activated a recovery procedure that finally succeeded, 
but VISA's rules (all the missed orders regarded VISA) required that the transfer of the 
money payment had to be delayed by 120 days
      so to allow for card holders complaints. In summary, I am still waiting to receive 
from VISA something like 25000 Euros (!!!), since the 120 days term ends on March 19 
(we are almost there). So, in the end, everything is under control, however the effect 
will be that I will not be able to respect the 6 months deadline for the financial 
closure of MMPS (the closure is due by the end of March. I already spoke about this 
problem with SP Conference Management, and they told me that there is no problem, 
IEEE does not apply any penalty until one full year is passed from the end of the 
workshop.

Comments and suggestions

   1. If the number of submitted papers remains the same as in 2004, we should 
      re-think the format of the workshop.
   2. In addition it could be necessary to have a much larger technical Program Committee
   3. In the end I think that the large number of submissions was due to several factors:

    * Siena is a nice town, only rarely touched by conferences and workshops;
    * In 2004 all the competing events were hold outside Europe
    * We only asked a two page summary, thus reducing the work necessary to submit a paper
    * The submission deadline fell in a good period: after the December/January rush 
      (ICIP, ICME …) and prior to the Summer rush