MM

We are proud to present a remarkably diverse and highly interesting Technical Program for the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2018 (ACM Multimedia 2018), which for the first time takes place in Seoul, Korea.

This year, a total of 15 areas of interest were grouped into four research themes, including an Understanding Theme (covering Multimedia and Vision, Multimodal Analysis and Description, and Deep Learning for Multimedia), an Engagement Theme (covering Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia, Multimedia Search and Recommendation, and Social Multimedia), an Experience Theme (covering Multimedia HCI and Quality of Experience, Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture, Multimedia for Collaboration in Education and Distributed Environments, and Music, Speech and Audio Processing in Multimedia), and a System Theme (covering Mobile Multimedia, Multimedia Scalability and Management System, Multimedia Systems and Middleware, Multimedia Telepresence and Virtual/Augmented Reality, and Multimedia Transport and Delivery).

Each research theme was overseen by one of this year's Technical Program Chairs. For each area of interest, a team of Area Chairs (ACs), ranging from 2 to 19 members, was recruited to handle the paper review process. In total, 92 ACs were appointed. The sizes of the teams were defined based on the anticipated number of submissions in each area. All submissions co-authored by program chairs (in total only three submissions) were handled in a separate Conflict-of-Interest (CoI) track led by the Program Co-chair Tao Mei.

The paper assignment was conducted by the combination of an automatic paper matching process (i.e., Toronto Paper Matching System) and the relevance matching between the paper and reviewer categories. The papers were handled in a double-blind fashion and for each paper a minimum of three reviews were required. We have recruited 685 program committee members to contribute their professional reviews to the submissions in a double-blind approach. On average, we received more than 3.76 reviews for each submission by the review deadline, which enabled the ACs to write meta reviews and proposed initial recommendations before the TPC meetings. ACs were instructed to administratively reject improperly formatted papers and to move papers to other tracks if they believed there was a better fit for the paper. All the submissions with the similar topics were grouped to ensure a fair calibration in the same group.

Decisions on orals/posters and best papers were made at the Technical Program Committee meeting held at the Workpia Yokohama, Yokohama, Japan. Many of the ACs who were unable to attend were tele-present online for discussions. The emphasis of the TPC meeting was on borderline and controversial submissions. The discussions were detailed and intensive, taking into account all the available data, including reviews, the authors' rebuttals, the reviewers' and ACs' discussions, the initial recommendations by the ACs, and any reviews performed by ACs during the meeting.