Welcome to MIR2008

The ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval is a premier scientific meeting for discussing the latest advances in the area of multimedia retrieval. All papers in the main track must be high quality original papers which address important issues in multimedia exploration, summarization and retrieval including, but not limited to:

Exploration of media archives - browsing, experiential computing
Interfaces for multimedia exploration, visualization, query and retrieval
Indexing and search of multimedia data: images, video, audio, multi-modal systems
Digital life experience analysis and retrieval - life logs, digital immortality, life bits
Video surveillance browsing and retrieval, object detection and recognition, archiving
Learning and relevance feedback in multimedia retrieval
Applications - world wide web searching, preserving cultural heritage, trademark search, data mining, person identification, scientific media, bio-computing and medical multimedia mining/indexing

Brave New Topics Session - emerging frontier theories and applications in MIR.

Invited Speakers

Prof. Thomas S. Huang , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Prof. Shih-Fu Chang, Columbia University

Prof. Ramesh Jain, University of California, Irvine

Conference Poster: View

http://press.liacs.nl/mir2008/mir08poster.pdf

Post Conference Summary

This year we received 308 unique full paper submissions of which 262 papers were selected by the organizing committee for the double-blind peer review process. Based upon the peer reviews of the program committee, 21 percent or 56 papers were accepted for the scientific research track including both oral and poster presentations.

The response from the scientific community was overwhelming. The initial conference seating was sold out early. With the help of Prof. El-Saddik and the Pan-Pacific Hotel, we were able to switch to a space more than double the original size; and we still had only standing room left.

First and foremost, thanks and appreciation goes to all of the organizers and community members of the previous MIR, CARPE, and VSSN related workshops for their ground breaking work and support. Research communities and conferences require strong foundations and in our case we could draw from a rich history of related activities. The support and involvement of Kiyo Aizawa, Mark Zhang, and Alberto del Bimbo contributed significantly to the international and cross-community appeal of this meeting.

We are also grateful to all of the members of the program committee and the additional reviewers. Their reviews of the submissions played a pivotal role in the quality of the conference. Moreover, Erwin Bakker and Alberto del Bimbo did an excellent job in organizing the enormous double-blind peer review and paper selection process. The paper review and decisions tasks were distributed between the program chairs to ensure no conflicts of interest. Mark Huiskes and Mark Zhang did excellent work in the critical mission of having the conference run smoothly.

Finally, we greatly appreciated the support of the ACM SIGMM through Klara Nahrstedt and Nevenka Dimitrova.

Best wishes,

Michael Lew

on behalf of the ACM MIR2008 Organizing Committee