Minutes of the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee Meeting ICASSP 2008, Las Vegas, USA Wednesday, April 2, 2008 Attendees: Yucel Altunbasak, John Apostolopoulos, Jeff Bloom, Yen-Kuang Chen, Li Deng, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Ching-Yung Lin (partly by phone), Shrikanth Narayanan, Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu, Ken Rose, Amir Said, Stefano Tubaro, Anthony Vetro, Min Wu, Zhengyou Zhang Guests: Wan-Chi Siu (MMSP’08); Dinei Florencio, Rico Malvar (MMSP’09); Jenq-Neng Hwang Anthony Vetro called the meeting to order at 12:00 noon. 1. INTRODUCTIONS 2. APPROVAL OF AGENDA 3. REPORT OF THE CHAIR - TC Report to SPS: review of major TC activities during past year including financial health of MMSP workshops, award nominations, and TC support of SPS journals. - Bylaws & Policy/Procedure Updates: recent updates have been approved. Any further comments or suggestion revisions should be brought to the attention of the TC chair. - New Web Site: thanks to Ingemar and the team at UCL for past support; new web site is hosted at the IEEE site and uses the IEEE template; should be easier to maintain. Any suggested updates to the site should be sent to Anthony. 4. WORKSHOPS - MMSP 2007 [Shri]: 60% acceptance overall, program worked very well including keynotes, overview talks and oral/posters. Social program worked well. Surplus of 28% has been reported. Sometimes difficult to find sponsors for paper awards; discussed whether it is possible to consider ways to support such awards on an ongoing basis. Beatrice confirmed the high quality of technical program; especially plenary sessions were very attractive. Emphasis for future: social aspect and intimate environment is very important to facilitate discussion, as well as organization of posters. Encourage show and tell, e.g., including demos, perhaps discussion session after each poster. Rico commented that food is good attraction for people to gather. Amir noted that Internet/wireless access requirements need careful assessment. - MMSP 2008 [W.-C. Siu, Jean-Luc]: budget has been approved, projecting 20% surplus; conference venue approved by SPS and deposit paid. Call for Papers has been distributed online and with flyers. Three sponsors of best paper award: oral, student, poster. Beatrice asked to consider splitting award for different areas since MMSP is broad. Ken asked to clarify purpose for oral/poster award distinction – organizing committee to check on this. TPC is established and workshop web page setup. Paper submission deadline is April 18. Four high-quality special session proposals are under consideration, which are a mix of theme and general MMSP areas; some down-selection to three proposals seems needed. Action for organizing committee: fix list of special session. Zhengyou suggested the same review process for special session papers – TC agreed. Four keynote speakers confirmed: two for theme and two for general MMSP areas. Planning on 300 paper submissions and 130 accepted papers; Anthony noted that these numbers seem high. Budget plan based on 130 attendees, so should be okay even if fewer papers are accepted. Beatrice requested plan for overview talks in afternoon. - MMSP 2009 [Dinei]: web site has been setup, promotion underway, Call for Papers being distributed. Actively looking for sponsorship: Mitsubishi and Microsoft have made commitments, and in discussion with others. Sheraton in Rio is main target for venue; received proposal, but further negotiation needed. Plan to include lunches and some evening events. Current proposal provides room rate of $200/night. Initial budget and proposal based on 150 attendees, but may adjust downward based on discussions with IEEE. Ken commented that number for facilities might be different than registered and room block commitments. Action item for organizers: follow up with IEEE on hotel negotiation and appropriate targets so as to avoid penalties. 5. SUBCOMMITTEES - Awards [Anthony for Phil]: Main activities reported as part of TC report. Suggest change to schedule for nominations and voting. Last year we did paper nominations in July and voting in August, and major award nominations in August and voting in September; this was a very compressed schedule and people were away over the summer. Propose stretching out each of those months to 1.5 months and not overlapping the paper and major award schedules, for example: Paper award nominations: April 1 – May 15 Paper award voting: May 16 – June 30 Major award nominations: July 1 – August 15 Major award voting: August 16 – September 30 Our endorsements are due to the SPS Awards Board on September 1 for the paper awards and October 1 for the major awards. Phil to follow up on awards process according to above schedule. - Conference [Min]: MMSP 2010 request for proposals has been drafted and circulated to TC; recommend keeping practice of regional rotation – next would be Europe, Middle East and Africa. Propose to finalize this week then post and begin distributing. Discussed plans for ICME 2009 workshops. Ching-Yung reported long history of discussion on running MMSP with ICME; new proposal and initiative to have involved societies run workshops in conjunction with ICME. With regard to timing, current proposal is to hold workshops on two days prior to ICME. Anthony suggested that subcommittee go offline to consider details including theme, format, timing, identifying volunteers, etc. Ken Rose and Li Deng requested that the subcommittee consider the impact on MMSP, i.e., would more people go to ICME rather than MMSP with attraction of new workshops at ICME? TC should establish position before ICME in June based on recommendation from subcommittee. Beatrice requested the subcommittee to consider maximizing interaction among independently organized workshops for all the societies. - Membership [Anthony for Yun]: membership subcommittee will begin to discuss recruiting targets and may have recommendations for the TC; new nomination and voting procedures may also be considered. - The need for additional subcommittees or liaison representatives was raised by Anthony. Min outlined the need for someone in the TC to be responsible for gathering and reporting TC related news for inclusion in the SPS e-Newsletter on a periodic basis throughout the year (perhaps twice per year). Anyone that is interested should contact Anthony and Min. Anthony also raised the need for a new technical directions subcommittee that would be responsible for updating the EDICS used for ICASSP, and providing input to the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia on their EDICS. 6. ICASSP 2009 PLANNING Anthony briefly reported plans by ICASSP 2009 organizers to introduce a more structured “thematic symposia” into the program that would consist of overview sessions, special sessions and regular sessions as appropriate, to support two or three target themes of the conference. The ICASSP organizers are asking for the support of all TC’s to help with this new initiative, e.g., determining appropriate themes, organizing overview sessions and identifying speakers. Zhengyou volunteered to help with this effort. 7. FUTURE TC MEETINGS The TC will hold meetings at both ICME and MMSP this year. The exact dates of the meetings will be announced later. - ICME 2008: June 23-26, 2008 - MMSP 2008: October 8-10, 2008 8. AOB John raised the issue of future meeting scheduling at ICASSP 2009. We should aim to avoid conflicts as much as possible, in particular with IMDSP, SP Magazine and IFS. We might consider making use of other times slots besides lunch, such as the morning or early evening. Follow up: poll TC members on acceptable dates and times. 9. ADJOURN The meeting adjourned at 1:25pm.