January 2012 Newsletter

Welcome to the December edition of the IEEE-TCMC (Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing) monthly mailing. TCMC membership is officially determined by signing up with the IEEE Computer Society either with your membership or later through:

http://www.computer.org/services/teca

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

This month’s topics include:

VL/HCC 2012 CFP
ISM 2012 Call for Workshop Proposals
IEEE Multimedia Special Issue on Near-Duplicate Search

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VL/HCC 2012

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing

September 30 – October 4, 2012
Innsbruck, Austria, co-located with MODELS’12
http://vlhcc.org/

IMPORTANT DATES
* Abstract submissions: 9 March 2012
* Paper submissions: 16 March 2012
* Notification of reviews: 25 May 2012
* Rebuttals due: 29 May 2012
* Notification of final decision: 6 June 2012
* Camera-ready copies due: 29 June 2012

From the beginning of the computer age, people have sought easier ways to learn, express, and understand computational ideas. Whether this meant moving from punch cards to textual languages, or command lines to graphical UIs, the quest to make computation easier to express, manipulate, and understand by a broader group of people is an ongoing challenge. The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) is the premier international forum for research on this topic. Established in 1984, the mission of the conference is to support the design, theory, application, and evaluation of computing technologies and languages for programming, modeling, and communicating, which are easier to learn, use, and understand by people.

SCOPE AND TOPICS

We solicit original, unpublished research papers that focus on efforts to design, formalize, implement, and evaluate computing languages and development tools that are easier to learn, easier to use, and easier to understand. This includes languages and tools expressed not only as text, but through any other means (visual, sketch-based, gesture-based, or otherwise). This also includes languages and tools intended for a wide range of audiences, including professional software developers, novice programmers, or any other people who find a need to express computational ideas. We also seek papers that address cognitive, social, cultural, and theoretical aspects of efforts to lower barriers to computing.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Design, evaluation, and theory of visual languages
* End-user development, end-user programming
* Novel user interfaces for expressing computation
* Human aspects of software development
* Debugging and program understanding
* Computer science education
* Software development tools
* Model-driven development
* Domain-specific languages
* Software visualization
* Query languages

PAPER SUBMISSIONS
We invite two kinds of papers, due March 16, 2012:

* full-length research papers, up to 8 pages
* short research papers, up to 4 pages

All accepted papers, whether full or short, should be complete archival contributions. The contribution from full papers are more extensive than those from short papers. Preliminary research should be submitted to the Posters category. All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee.

Accepted papers will be distributed at the conference and will appear in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. In 2011 the conference paper format was changed by IEEE, so be sure you are using the new format, which is available at:

http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html

Moreover, authors of the best papers accepted for the conference will be invited to submit revised versions for a special issue of the Journal of Visual Languages and Computing.

=== A Note on Evaluations ===

Research papers are expected to support their claims with appropriate evidence. For example, a paper that claims to improve programmer productivity is expected to demonstrate improved productivity. However, not all claims necessarily need to be supported with empirical evidence or studies with people. A paper that claims to make something feasible that was clearly infeasible might substantiate its claim through the existence of a prototype. Moreover, there are many alternatives to empirical evidence, including analytical methods or formal arguments. We encourage authors to think carefully about what claims their submission makes and what evidence would support them.

SATELLITE EVENTS

The Symposium organizes also the following satellite events:

1. Graduate Symposium – sponsored by NSF
2. Demos from industrial partners and sponsors
3. Workshops and tutorials

More info can be found at http://vlhcc.org

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS

General Chair
Gennaro Costagliola University of Salerno, Italy

Program Co-Chairs
Martin Erwig Oregon State University, USA
Gem Stapleton University of Brighton, UK

Workshop & Poster Chairs
Paolo Bottoni Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Claudia Ermel Technische Universitat Berlin, Germany

Publicity Chair
Vittorio Fuccella University of Salerno, Italy

Proceedings & Web Chair
Mattia De Rosa University of Salerno, Italy
Fabrizio Torre University of Salerno, Italy

STEERING COMMITTEE
Paolo Bottoni – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Gennaro Costagliola – Universita di Salerno, Italy
Robert DeLine – Microsoft Research, USA
John Grundy – Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
John Howse – University of Brighton, UK
Andrew Ko, University of Washington, USA
Mark Minas – Universitaet der Bundeswehr Muenchen, Germany
Brad Myers – Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Emmanuel Pietriga – INRIA, France

VISIT OUR WEB SITE

http://vlhcc.org/

LIKE US ON FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/vlhcc

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

http://twitter.com/vlhcc

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ISM 2012 Call for Workshop Proposals held in conjunction with

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2012) Irvine, CA, USA, December 10-12, 2012 http://ism.eecs.uci.edu/ISM2012/index.html

The IEEE ISM2012 organizing committee invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the symposium. The workshops aim to explore focused interest areas and provide international forums for scientists, engineers, and computer users to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and research results on hot topics of multimedia computing. Workshops for presenting papers from industrial companies and papers on implementations of systems and services are also welcome. It is expected that the proceedings of the workshop programs will be published together with the main symposium proceedings by IEEE CS Press.

In general, a workshop takes one day, although multiple-day and half-day workshops are welcome. If you would like to organize a “one-day” workshop, 10 to 12 accepted papers and presentations would be necessary. The organizers of approved workshops are responsible for distributing the call-for-papers for their workshop, collecting submissions, conducting the paper review process, and deciding upon the final workshop program. Please note that the page limit is 6 pages in IEEE double-column format for workshop papers.

Workshop proposals should be submitted via email to Dr. Chengcui Zhang at zhang@cis.uab.edu by March 15, 2012. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by March 30.

Workshop Chairs:

Lars Knipping, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany
Ming Li, California State University, Fresno, USA
Harald Sack, Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany
Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA

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IEEE Multimedia Special Issue on Web-Scale Near-Duplicate Search: Techniques and Applications

Submission Deadline: 29 June 2012
Publication Issue: July-September 2013

As bandwidth accessible to average users is increasing, audiovisual material has become the fastest growing data type on the Internet. The impressive growth of the social Web where users can exchange user-generated content contributes to the overwhelming number of multimedia files available. Among these huge volumes of data, there exist large numbers of near-duplicates and copies. File copies are easy to detect using hashes. Near-duplicates are based on the same original content, but have been edited and post processed, resulting in different files. Another type of near-duplicate relates to footage about the same event or scene. The detection of near-duplicates poses a challenge to multimedia content analysis, especially when speed, scale, and copied fragment length are pushed to operational levels.

Near-duplicates carry both informative and redundant signals, for example, providing rich visual clues for indexing and summarizing videos from different sources. On the other hand, the excessive amount of near-duplicates makes browsing Web videos streamed over Internet an extremely time-consuming task. As a result, there is strong interest from industry, academia, and governmental agencies in Web-scale search, elimination, detection, and use of near-duplicates for various multimedia applications.

Topic

This special issue seeks innovative contributions dedicated to the theme of Web-scale near-duplicate search. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to, the following:

Techniques and algorithms near-duplicate and/or partial near-duplicate detection; cross-media search of near-duplicates; semantic-based detection of near-duplicates; framework and algorithm for real-time, near-duplicate detection; semantic indexing and hashing techniques; similarity and perception learning; multimedia fingerprint extraction; and instance search, matching, and localization.

Applications search results ranking and diversification; novelty detection; topic detection, tracking, and threading; data-driven applications; Internet media management and service; Web-scale multimedia mining; Web-scale summarization and browsing of multimedia data; and multimedia archaeology mining.

Questions?

For more information, please contact the guest editors:

Chong-Wah Ngo, City University of Hong Kong
Changsheng Xu, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Wessel Kraaij, TNO Information and Communication Technology
Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, University of Ottawa, Ontario

Submission Procedures

Submit your paper at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your paper, please select the appropriate special issue title under the category “Manuscript Type.” If you have any questions regarding the submission system, please contact Andy Morton at mm-ma@computer.org.

All submissions will undergo a blind peer review by at least two expert reviewers to ensure a high standard of quality. Referees will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity of exposition, and relevance to the special issue topics. All submissions must contain original, previously unpublished research or engineering work. Papers must stay within the following limits: 6,500 words maximum, 12 total combined figures and tables with each figure counting as 200 words toward the total word count, and 18 references.

Deadlines

To submit a paper to the July-September 2013 special issue, please observe the following deadlines:

29 June 2012: Full paper must be submitted using our online manuscript submission service and prepared according to the instructions for authors (please see the Author Resources page at http://www.computer.org/multimedia/author.htm).

15 January 2013: Authors notified of acceptance, rejection, or needed revisions. 5 April 2013: Final versions due.