December 2013 Newsletter

Welcome to December’s edition of the IEEE-TCMC (Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing) monthly mailing.

This month’s topics include:

1. IEEE ICME’14 deadline extension
2. Industry news (Cisco’s H.264 announcement, New version of the HLS protocol )
3. IEEE ICSC’14 CFP

To join TCMC, or to update your information, especially your email address, visit the following web site and fill in the online form.

https://www.ieee.org/membership-catalog/productdetail/showProductDetailPage.html?product=CMYMC717

Computer Society and IEEE members will use their usual IEEE web account login to access membership products and renew. Nonmembers can create an IEEE web account to join any TC.

TCMC home: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tcmc

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IEEE ICME 2014 deadline extension!

www.icme2014.org

The workshop proposal submission deadline is extended to Dec. 15, 2013.

Paper submission deadlines are extended by one week. The new abstract submission deadline is Dec 10, 2013 (23:59 Pacific Time). The new full paper submission deadline is Dec 16, 2013 (23:59 Pacific Time). Please note these new deadlines are FINAL.

Paper Submission Site is Now Open!
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INDUSTRY NEWS (Contributed by Dr. Edwin Heredia)

Cisco’s H.264 announcement:

The topic of video codecs has been a constant source of contention in the HTML5 world. The standardized H.264 codec has strong industry adoption, but its patent licensing requirements impose severe constraints on the open source community. Recently Cisco has stepped forward offering a solution. Cisco has announced that they will release high-quality open-source and binary versions of the codec software for free. The licensing fees will be paid by Cisco and not transferred to applications that use the software. Mozilla has already announced that they will use Cisco’s software to provide H.264 support in the Firefox browser.

Although this initiative alleviates the video problem and facilitates ubiquity of H.264 implementations, web discussions on this announcement show that the more fundamental question remains unanswered; that is, whether it is reasonable for web standards to adopt patent-encumbered technologies that limit implementation options for open web initiatives.

New version of the HLS protocol:

Apple has published a new version of the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. HLS is a protocol used to deliver segmented audiovisual streams at different bitrates over a network. Apple has been publishing HLS specifications as an IETF Internet Draft since 2009. As an Internet Draft, the document is technically an informational contribution different from documents on track to become industry standards.

Despite this characterization, there is no doubt that HLS has gained considerable industry support with many available client and server implementations. The new version, identified as document 12, protocol version 6, adds two new tags, changes some of the attributes in previously available tags, and adds multiple descriptive clarifications.

The new version of the protocol is available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-12

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Call for Papers

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Eighth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing

IEEE ICSC2014

June 18th-20th, 2014, Newport Beach, CA, USA

http://www.ieee-icsc.org/

Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society

The field of Semantic Computing addresses the derivation of semantic information from content and the connection of semantics to knowledge, where “content” may be anything including structured data, video, audio, text, hardware, software, process, etc.

The Eighth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2014) continues to foster the growth of a new research community. The conference builds on the success of the past ICSC conferences as an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying emerging research topics and defining the future of the field. The event is located in Irvine, California at Irvine Hyatt. The technical program of ICSC 2014 includes workshops, invited keynotes, paper presentations, panel discussions, industrial ‘show and tells’, demonstrations, and more. Submissions of high-quality papers describing mature results or ongoing work are invited.

The main goal of the conference is to foster the dialog between experts in each sub-discipline. Therefore we especially encourage submissions of work that is interesting to multiple areas, such as multimodal approaches.

Please refer to the conference website for further information:
http://www.ieee-icsc.org/

Areas of interest include:

Semantics based Analysis
– Natural language processing
– Image and video analysis
– Audio, music, and speech analysis
– Data and web mining
– Behavior of software, services, and networks
– Services and networks
– Security – Privacy
– Analysis of social networks

Semantic Integration
– Metadata and other description languages
– Database schema integration
– Ontology integration
– Interoperability and service integration
– Semantic programming languages and software engineering
– Semantic system design and synthesis

Applications using Semantics
– Big data
– Search engines and question answering
– Semantic web services
– Content-based multimedia retrieval and editing
– Context-aware networks of sensors, devices, and applications
– Devices and applications
– Digital library applications
– Machine translation
– Music description and meta-creation
– Medicine and Biology
– GIS systems and architecture

Semantic Interfaces
– Natural language interfaces
– Multimodal interfaces and mediation technology
– Human centered computing

SUBMISSIONS

Regular Papers and Short Papers. Authors are invited to submit an 8-page (regular) or 4-page (short) technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the guidelines available on the ICSC20103 web page.

Demonstration Papers and Posters. Authors are invited to submit an 2-page (demonstration or poster) technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the guidelines available on the ICSC2014 web page.

Workshops and Special Sessions. The organizing committee invites proposals for workshops and special sessions to be held in conjunction with the conference. These will focus on specific topics of the main conference. More information is available on the ICSC2014 web page.

The Conference Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press. Distinguished quality papers presented at the conference will be selected for publications in internationally renowned journals.

IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop Proposals: Dec. 15th, 2013
Regular Paper & Short Paper Submission: Feb. 15th, 2014
Demo Paper & Poster Paper Submission: Feb. 15th, 2014
Industry Paper Submission: Feb. 15th, 2014