Minutes of the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee Meeting MMSP 2009, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil Monday, October 5, 2009 Attendees: Oscar Au, Phil Chou, Fernando Pereira, Amir Said, Marco Tagliasacchi, Anthony Vetro Guests: Ricardo de Queiroz, Dinei Florencio, Marco Cagnazzo, Zixiang Xiong Anthony called the meeting to order at 12:45pm. 1) INTRODUCTIONS 2) REVIEW AGENDA 3) REPORT OF THE CHAIR Anthony is finalizing the TC report for SPS meetings at ICIP. Report is ready, just needs financial data for MMSP 2009. The report will be made available to the TC. Anthony also noted that ICASSP reviewing will begin shortly. The MMSP track recieved 121 papers, which is about 20% higher than last year. Request full support of the TC. Amir suggested that TC members review a minimum number of papers, e.g., 10. This was agreed among the members present. 4) WORKSHOP REPORTS - MMSP09 Report (Ricardo, Dinei) Approximately $66K revenue and $17K sponsorship for a total income of 83K. Expect $69K in expenses yielding a surplus of 20% (or $14K). 115 registered attendees, but some additional volunteers, etc. Room blocks have been met and technical program looks great. Microsoft helped with web page for paper submission. Used paper bidding this year and that worked out well. System can be used for free, so should consider for MMSP 2010. Organizers would need account. Phil and Dinei offered to help arrange. Should also reuse list of reviewers. ## Action Item for the organizers: follow up w/IEEE to close books. - MMSP10 Update (Marco Cagnazzo) Contract and budget sent to IEEE. They plan to sign soon to secure the venue. Web site is up. For paper management, team was planning to use EDAS, but nothing signed yet. There is still a possibility to switch to Microsoft system. Registration will be handled by staff at INRIA. Call for Papers being publicized. 5) SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS - Awards (Amir) Endorsed Ray Liu for Technical Achievement award, after two rounds of voting and three very qualified candidates. Endorsement for SP Magazine best paper award: Zhou Wang and Alan C. Bovik, "Mean Squared Error: Love It or Leave It? A new look at signal fidelity measures," IEEE SPM, Jan. 2008. Endorsement for Best Paper award Yi Su and Mihaela van der Schaar, "Multiuser multimedia resource allocation over multicarrier wireless networks," IEEE Trans SP, May 2008. Amir suggested possible changes to the rules for nominating and endorsing awards. For instance, it is not ideal when only one paper is nominated in a category. There was broad agreement that it is better to have multiple candidates. Amir also noted the common practice of an author asking someone to nominate their paper for an award and asked if there was some way to prohibit this. Fernando commented that this is difficult to enforce since the paper may indeed be very good and worthy of the nomination. It was agreed that nominators should judge the quality themselves. In general, it was acknowledged that the TC needs to be more active in the nominations process. Anthony suggested the TC consider a nominations subcommittee to collect a pool of candidates. Phil noted that this might be done in a systematic way, e.g., checking citations, etc. Amir also suggested possible changes to the bylaws, e.g., require more than one candidate in a category to provide an endorsement, or changes in the voting rules. There is a need to increase the credibility of the papers and awards that we endorse. ## Action Item for Amir: consider proposed changes to our nominations ## and endorsement procedures. - Membership (Anthony for Yen-Kuang) The subcommittee received 17 candidates. The list of candidates looks very impressive and there seem to be a number of good candidates in under-represented areas such as audio and database. There are still ongoing discussions on whether to extend the nomination deadline. Given the healthy list of candidates, there does not seem to be a strong reason to do so. The subcommittee will inform the TC of any deadline extensions. The team is also preparing for the election itself and will notify the TC of the voting procedure. A spreadsheet that indicates the areas covered by each candidate has been circulated. The subcommittee is considering providing a way for you to match your votes to a target distribution determined by the subcommittee. Anthony pointed out some problems with this. Most importantly, we should not be steering members to vote a specific way. All members present agreed not to target a specific distribution. ## Action Item for Yen-Kuang: announce process for election ## of new members. - Technical Directions (Marco Tagliasacchi) Prepared revised version of EDICS. Added topic for quality assessment, moved standards under communication and networking and reviewed the placement of watermarking and fingerprinting. 6) FUTURE ICME/MMSP DISCUSSION Anthony noted that the report on ICME was delivered to SPS on September 15. Thanks to all that contributed. Anthony reported that a new interim steering committee has been established by VPs of the sponsoring societies. Phil Chou has agreed to serve as the interim chair. Fernando and Zhengyou have been appointed as SPS representatives to the interim committee. TC will need to plan for SPS representatives to ICME steering committee, which should be effective on Jan 1, 2010. Phil and Anthony will organize elections before the end of this year. There was not time to discuss ICME/MMSP planning, so a second session was called for Wednesday, October 7 from 12:45-13:45 with all TC members attending. The notes from this session are included in the Appendix below. Zixiang expressed interest in hosting a future MMSP workshop in Glascow. Due to the uncertainty around ICME and MMSP, the TC has not yet proceeded with workshop planning beyond 2010. The desire to keep MMSP workshop running as an independent event has been expressed and was echoed during the meeting. It is expected that an open call for hosting of future MMSP workshop will be made, and we will keep the Glascow team informed. Zixiang was also asked whether the team would consider hosting a future ICME event. He will go back to discuss with others in the team. 7) NEXT MEETING The next MMSP TC meeting will be held in March 2010 during ICASSP in Dallas. 8) ADJOURN The meeting was adjourned at 13:45pm. ================================================================ Appendix: Additional Session on MMSP/ICME Planning 1. MMSP Planning. Considering the uncertainties around the future of ICME and prior reflector discussions, it was agreed among those present to continue MMSP and plan for an event in 2011. The TC should aim to have responses prior to the next ICASSP in Dallas so that presentations could be made there. The call should be finalized before the end of December. ## Action Item for workshop subcommittee: prepare call for ## proposal to host MMSP 2011 before end of December with ## responses due before ICASSP 2010. 2. ICME 2010 or 2011: According to Oscar, proposed general chair of ICME 2010 in Singapore, decision needed within 2 weeks in order to proceed. Report from TC outlines the pros and cons; thise should be shared with the interim steering committee. As interim steering committee chair, Phil will follow up with the committee to reach a decision. ## Action Item for Anthony: share TC report on ICME with ## the interim steering committee. 3. ICME Charter: there seems to be a need to clarify the election process for new SPS representatives to the steering committee. It was suggested that society represenattives are not limited to the TC members and that any SPS member in good standing could serve in this role. Those represenattives that are not TC members may be appointed as a non-voting liaison members to interface with teh TC. Also, although not specifically part of the charter, the technical areas that MMSP will be responsible for also needs discussion. ## Action Item for SPS representatives: clarify election ## process (if needed) and the technical areas that MMSP ## TC will be responsible for with the interim steering ## committee. ## Action Item for Anthony and Phil: organize election ## of new SPS represenatives to ICME steering committee. 4. ICME Steering Committee Chair: elections are needed. Phil will organize. Rather than select among the interim steering committee members, who were pulled together very quickly for a short term task, it is suggested that there be an open call for nominations in the first year. ## Action Item for SPS representatives: propose open ## call for next ICME steering committee chair.