Minutes of the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee Meeting ICME 2008, Hannover, Germany Tuesday, June 24, 2008 Attendees: Christine Guillemot, Ching-Yung Lin, Fernando Pereira, Carlo Regazzoni, Eckehard Steinbach, Anthony Vetro Guests: Pascal Frossard, Joern Ostermann The meeting was call to order at 12:40 pm. 1. INTRODUCTIONS 2. REVIEW AGENDA 3. REPORT OF THE CHAIR - MMSP 2008: 323 paper submissions, which seems much higher than past years. Paper reviews being completed now. Check with organizers on planned acceptance ratio and distributions of submitted/accepted papers by region. This event will be held one week before ICIP, so need to keep up with publicity for participation. - MMSP 2009: organizers still working on securing venue. They currently have a contract with Sheraton in Rio, but sleeping rooms would be booked through a third-party events company. SPS has written policy against such arrangements. - New “technical directions” subcommittee has been established with initial members (Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu, Ken Rose and Jeffery Bloom). One mandate is to review and update EDICS for our TC, i.e., that used for ICASSP paper submission. Need to check and update topics, and define subcategories. New areas are particularly important to identify. Eckehard suggested haptics as one possibility – members present agreed that this area is a good match with our TC activities. Eckehard agreed to participate in subcommittee. Another mandate of this subcommittee is to work with T-MM on potential revisions to its EDICS. 5. SUBCOMMITTEE ACTIVITIES - Awards: should start to consider awards now since SPS deadlines are October 1. Phil Chou to follow up with TC. - Conference: The call for MMSP 2010 workshop proposals has been issued. Christine confirmed potential interest from France; there might also be interest from London and Spain as well. Since it takes time and effort to put complete proposals, Pascal suggested that we request letters of intent. In this way, early feedback from the TC could be provided back to potential organizers. It was agreed to make this informal, just a message to the TC with responses due by end of July. Another item discussed within the Conference subcommittee is the ICME’09 workshop. Ching-Yung provided background and summarized the recommendations of the subcommittee (see appendix). There were no objections at the meeting and on the reflector, so the TC will go forward with this plan. Eckehard asked about the registration package – it was agreed that there should be sufficient flexibility to attend workshops and the conference or various subsets and combinations of each. Fernando emphasized the importance of the workshop format – it was agreed that the workshop must offer something more than special sessions that could be accommodated in ICME. More interactive sessions are desired, e.g., speakers with opposing views, panels and/or wrap- up sessions. The topics and speakers also need very careful consideration. Pascal asked about overlapping the workshops with ICME – this might be difficult, but a shortened ICME event might be considered. Action: conference subcommittee and workshop organizers to consider workshop format further and solicit further input from TC. - Membership: still early, but should be considering potential candidates. Anthony to follow up with Yun He. 5. FUTURE TC MEETINGS The TC will hold its next meeting at MMSP 2008 in Cairns, Australia during October 8- 10, 2008. The exact date of the meeting will be announced later. 6. AOB Pascal is responsible for TC news in the SP Magazine e-newsletter. Each TC has been asked to assign a liaison representative for the newsletter. Anyone interested should contact the TC chair. Carlo asked about technical co-sponsorship on non-IEEE workshops. Anthony referred to the procedure we recently adopted that requires one-third voting members to actively support, e.g., committing to paper reviews. 7. ADJOURN The meeting adjourned at 2:10 pm. APPENDIX: ICME’09 WORKSHOP * Background: ICME'09 committee initiated the ideas of inviting more active participation of the four societies' multimedia TC than just the routine effort of reviewing technical papers for the conf; having TC-sponsored satellite workshops also aims at attracting high-quality work. ICME will provide assistance on logistics and can accommodate 1-2 day workshop before or after the main conference; additional workshop registration fee is about $100-120/day. Ching-Yung Lin of IBM Research who is ICME'09 General Chair and also a member of our TC brought this issue for MMSP-TC (representing SPS) to consider. * Subcommittee's recommendations: (1) We recognize that ICME is a four-society effort including SPS, and MMSP is the closest technical unit to represent SPS in this. MMSP TC members has been playing a major role in ICME, and we feel this is a platform for our TC to continue taking a leadership role and help ICME grow. (2) We consider 1-day workshop on some emerging trends or topic areas in MMSP scope as a suitable format for our TC's participation. This 1-day event can be in the format of 2-3 expanded special sessions, which may include 1-2 long invited/plenary talks, several regular talks, and a panel and/or demo session. ICME has agreed to take care of most logistics. Session organizers may play a main role in assembling the sessions, and a workshop chair will coordinate the overall effort and finalize details such as publication format (e.g. as part of ICME proceeding, maybe in the form of 1-page summary, with an option of full paper for interested contributors). (3) We suggest soliciting inputs from TC members on topic suggestions, potential organizers, and session formats in summer/fall 2008. TC members are encouraged to contribute to the workshop, as session organizers and/or presenters/authors. Y-K Chen of Intel (yen-kuang.chen@intel.com) has kindly agreed to serve as workshop coordinator to gather these inputs and also as our TC's interface with the ICME'09 committee. (4) As a 1-day workshop with mostly invited sessions, the amount of effort from our TC is moderate and would be manageable, and we believe the workshop and TC's involvement would not negatively affect MMSP'09 workshop. Note that it has been several years for ICME and MMSP workshops held about 3-4 months apart; even without a satellite workshop, there are a significant number of submissions and attendance to each event by colleagues in mmsp areas; further, there were already workshops near/co- located with ICME on focused topics (such as in 2007) and did not appear to affect the MMSP workshop of the same year. (5) With regard to the discussions in previous years on whether or not MMSP should co- locate with ICME, this has been deferred for future discussion according to the TC meeting held in ICASSP'07. The main consideration was that it is up to how ICME would plan and evolve; and our TC will see later (after 2010) which way would be advantegeous for MMSP workshop. Standalone MMSP workshops are being planed for 2008-2010, and we expect they will continue to be unique and attractive events by its small scale, single track, close attendee interaction (through breakfast/lunch and other social events), and appealing locations. Note that the call-for-proposal of MMSP 2010 is open, and we encourage TC members to help spread the words and invite proposals (http://www.cspl.umd.edu/spm/eNews/eNews200804.html#conf).