MM

Welcome to the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM'03), the premier technical conference on multimedia applications, content, and systems. MM'03 is richer in many respects than most technical meetings as it represents a careful blend of science, technology, and arts.The technical program achieves a balance between theory and practice, academia and industry, as well as applications, content, and systems research. Over 255 individual authors and teams from 25 countries and 4 continents submitted technical papers to the conference. Approximately 40% of the submissions came from North America, 20% from Europe, and 30% from Asia. These submissions were partitioned into three tracks: Applications (74 submission), Content (100 submissions), and Systems (81 submissions). Three program committee members reviewed each submission. Additional reviews from experts outside the program committee were obtained for several submissions. The program committee met in June at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center to discuss the submissions and select the papers to be presented at the conference. The review process culminated in the acceptance of 43 papers (10 papers in the Applications track, 19 papers in the Content track, and 14 papers in the Systems track) with a total acceptance rate of 17%. Each selected submission was assigned a shepherd. Authors were encouraged to reviewer comments with their shepherds and revise the paper accordingly. The shepherds approved the final versions of the paper; you are seeing the result of this hard work! Everyone owes thanks to the program committee and the shepherds for their important contributions. We also owe the program committee chairs, specifically Thomas Plagemann, Prashant Shenoy, and John R. Smith our gratitude for a difficult job, well done.The conference program also includes tutorials, workshops, demonstrations, posters, and video demonstrations. The demonstrations, posters, and video submissions were also reviewed. Again, the many reviewers, listed elsewhere in these proceedings, did an outstanding job. We are excited about the breadth and depth of the multimedia program.A doctoral symposium is being held for the fourth year. This program, which occurs at the end of the technical program Thursday afternoon, allows students engaged in dissertation research to present their work to the public. Everyone who has participated in these sessions in the past, particularly faculty and researchers from industry, has responded positively to the experience. Those of you in academia know that PhD qualifying or preliminary exams, however they are called, are an enjoyable experience because you get to talk about research and innovative ideas rather than fight bureaucracies or grade piles of exams. We strongly encourage people interested in new ideas and research to attend, particularly those of you thinking about hiring faculty and researchers in the future.