MM

Welcome to the Fourteenth ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 20) , held October 23-27, 2006 at Fess Parker's Doubletree Resort Hotel in beautiful Santa Barbara, California, USA.ACM Multimedia is the premier annual professional meeting for communicating the state-of-the-art in multimedia research, technology, and art. As in previous years, starting with the first ACM Multimedia conference in 1993, the conference seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, and government who are interested in exploring and exploiting new and multiple media to create new capabilities for human expression, communication, collaboration, and interaction. ACM Multimedia covers all aspects of multimedia computing: from underlying technologies to applications, theory to practice, and servers to networks to devices. Multimedia is an interdisciplinary endeavor, and the variety of conference events reflects this. The overall conference encompasses three major parts: interesting tutorials on Monday, October 23, an exciting three-day main conference on Tuesday through Thursday, October 24-26, and a set of workshops in hot multimedia areas on Friday, October 27.The three-day main conference comprises several different technical program elements, each with separate submissions and reviewing: full papers, short papers, a panel, the doctoral symposium, Brave New Topics sessions, technical demonstrations, a video program, an open source contest, and the Interactive Arts Program. We are excited to host two keynote presentations by Ken Goldberg of UC Berkeley and Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!, who will give unique perspectives of their work in academia and industry.The program co-chairs for ACM MM 2006 are Yong Rui, Wolfgang Klas, and Ketan Mayer-Patel, who were responsible, along with a program committee of 92 members, for selecting the long paper program in the areas of Content, Applications, and Systems. These tracks received 292 long paper submissions (128 in Content, 100 in Applications, and 64 in Systems). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a double-blind review process. The program committee met on June 21, 2006 in Redmond, Washington to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 48 long papers: 21 in the Content track, 16 in the Applications track, and 11 in the Systems track. This represents an acceptance rate of 16 percent. We heartily thank the program co-chairs and the program committee members for their outstanding and dedicated work.The short paper program received 178 submissions and, after a thorough review process, accepted 66 papers, for a 37 percent acceptance rate. These will be presented during poster sessions at the conference. Many thanks to the short paper program co-chairs Brian Bailey, Belle Tseng, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian for an excellent job.