ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2018

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ACM Multimedia Systems 2017 & NOSSDAV, MMVE, PacketVideo and NetGames

July 28th, 2018

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The 9th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Systems (MMsys 2018) took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands from June 12th until 15th, with the colocated workshops: 10th International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE2018), 16th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames2018), 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV2018), and 28th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Digital Audio and Video (NOSSDAV2018). Attendance this year was particularly high, with over 170 registered participants from all over the world. Around 20% of the participants were students.

Since its inauguration in 2011, the MMSys series has provided an opportunity for researchers to present and share their latest research in multimedia systems. MMSys covers interdisciplinary research, spanning across the following system domains in the context of multimedia data types: networking; operating systems; real-time systems; and database communities. In particular, MMSys is the home of researchers who explore: (i) complete multimedia systems that provide a new kind of multimedia experience or systems or (ii) enhancements to one or more system components for continuous media or time-dependent services.

While building on the successful format of past MMSys conferences, MMSys 2018 introduced some novelties and extended previous successful initiatives. The main objectives we would like to highlight are:

• to promote open science by supporting the datasets and open source track, and by granting ACM reproducibility badges;
• to increase diversity and facilitate inclusion by offering many travel grants to young, diverse scholars;
• to increase the impact and broaden the community by incorporating top-quality workshops and forward-looking special sessions.

First of all, the format of the conference slightly changed from past years by including four prestigious workshops: PacketVideo and the MMVE the day before the main conference (June 12th), and NOSSDAV and NetGames the day after (June 15th). Secondly, we strived to facilitate diversity and inclusion. Thanks to the generous assistance of ACM SIGMM, a large number of young scholars (21 in total) were supported to attend MMSys by offering two types of travel grants: one for students with an accepted article and another one for nurturing new talent in SIGMM (part of the SIGMM Funding for New Initiatives including Desk Study of Gender and Diversity within SIGMM).

The 10th International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE2018) was chaired by Wei Tsang Ooi (National University of Singapore). The workshop included two sessions with scientific presentations on delivering immersiveness, and interaction and experience, and an interactive “Fishbowl” discussion. The best paper of the workshop was “Improving the Quality of 3D Immersive Interactive Cloud-Based Services Over Unreliable Network“ by De-Yu Chen and Magda El-Zarki.

The 16th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames2018) was chaired by Gwendal Simon (IMT Atlantique) and Bernard Wong (University Waterloo). The workshop included two sessions with scientific presentations and the best paper award went to “A Classification of Video Games based on Game Characteristics linked to Video Coding Complexity” by Saman Zadtootaghaj, Steven Schmidt, Nabajeet Barman, Sebastian Möller, and Maria G. Martini.

The 23rd Packet Video Workshop (PV2018) was chaired by Ali C. Begen (Ozyegin University and Networked Media) and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt and Bitmovin Inc.). The workshop TPC chairs were Roger Zimmermann (National University of Singapore) and Thomas Schierl (Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute). The keynote of the workshop was on “Simultaneous Migration of Codecs, Formats and DRM“ by Jason Burgess (Comcast). PV2018 included three sessions on new media applications, content coding, and media streaming. The best paper award went to the paper “6K Effective Resolution with 4K HEVC Decoding Capability for OMAF-compliant 360° Video Streaming“ by A. Zare, A. Aminlou, and M. Hannuksela.

The 28th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NOSSDAV2018) was chaired by Ketan Mayer-Patel (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and with Chuan Wu (University of Hong Kong) and Nabil J. Sarhan, (Wayne State University) as TPC chairs. The keynote of the workshop was given by Patrick Le Callet (Université de Nantes), titled “Saliency modeling in 360: why and how”. NOSSDAV2018 included three sessions on network/caching issues in streaming, rate control in video streaming, and immersive streaming. The best paper award went to “A simple yet effective network-assisted signal for enhanced DASH quality of experience” by Jacques Samain, Giovanna Carofiglio, Michele Tortelli, and Dario Rossi.

We also continued (and expanded) initiatives that were successfully introduced in 2017. With the goal to further grow the community and to broaden the scope of the conference, we included five special sessions on the following topics: human-centric internet and multimedia systems; immersive multimedia experiences; integrative computer vision and multimedia systems; IoT and smart cities; and multimedia in 5G network architectures. The aim is that in the coming years such special sessions will become core areas of interest. In addition, we continued to support recent efforts for scientific reproducibility. A record number of MMsys papers, 31 (45% of all the accepted articles), obtained an ACM badge by making data sets and code available, which will allow other researchers to reproduce the results presented in these papers.

We are delighted to see that MMSys has become a venue that is of high interest to the research community. This was expressed by a total of 115 submissions (56 for the research track and 59 combined for the special sessions). Out of the 115 submissions a total of 30 papers were accepted for publication. This represents a 26% acceptance rate. As in previous years, a high standard was applied for the review process. For the research track, each paper received a minimum of four reviews, while for the special sessions, each paper received at least three reviews. Authors also had the opportunity to rebut the reviews, and decisions were taken based on the reviews, the rebuttal, and the discussion between the reviewers. Obviously, establishing such a rigorous, double-blind review process would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of the program committee. Apart from the research track, the demo session received 20 submissions, and the open source/dataset track an impressive number of 36 submissions. This demonstrates the importance of open science to our community. The proceedings, highlighting ACM reproducibility badges and best paper awards, can be found here: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3204949

The general chair of ACM MMsys 2018 was Pablo Cesar (CWI), and the program chairs were Michael Zink (University of Massachusetts in Amherst) and Niall Murray (Athlone Institute of Technology). Here you can find the full organization committee of the conference.

On June 12th, the conference started with four excellent overview talks:

• “Distribution Systems for 3D Teleimmersive and Video 360 Content: Similarities and Differences“ by Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• “Evolution of Video Streams at Netflix: Streaming Higher Quality at Lower Bitrates” by Jan De Cock (Netflix)
• “VR360: State of the Art, State of the Industry & State of the Standards“ by Rob Koenen (Tiledmedia and TNO)
• “Media Distribution over Next Generation 5G Networks“ by Imed Bouazizi (Samsung Research America)

On June 13th and 14th, two keynotes took place:

• “Holograms are the Next Video“ by Philip A. Chou (8i), with a focus on hologram compression and delivery over networks for telepresence, live broadcast, and streaming media on demand
• “Pervasive Data for Large-scale Human Behavior Modeling“ by Nuria Oliver (Vodafone & Data-Pop Alliance), discussing about three projects that illustrate the value of pervasive data to help us model and understand certain aspects of human behavior

The conference included seven sessions covering the broad set of topics of interest for the ACM MMsys community; two sessions on streaming, and sessions on IoT, vision, VR streaming and motion capture, 5G, and QoE. The demo sessions promoted applied research, application prototypes and systems along with the scientific program. The sessions not only showcased the applicability of recent results to real-world problems but also triggered the exchange of ideas between theory and practice and collaborations between MMSys attendees. In MMsys 2018, a long interactive session (of three hours) showcased 16 accepted demos and 23 posters presenting open source software and datasets.

The selected best paper candidates from this year will be invited to resubmit a longer version of the paper for a special issue of ACM Transactions of Multimedia (TOMM). Here is the special section including papers from ACM MMSys 2017. The best paper awards of the conference, sponsored by Comcast, went to:

Best paper award:

• “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming for Multi-Viewpoint Omnidirectional Videos” by Xavier Corbillon, Francesca De Simone, Gwendal Simon and Pascal Frossard

Best student paper award:

• “Want to Play DASH? A Game Theoretic Approach for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP” by Abdelhak Bentaleb, Ali C. Begen, Saad Harous and Roger Zimmermann

Best workshop paper award:

• “Improving the Quality of 3D Immersive Interactive Cloud-Based Services Over Unreliable Network” by De-Yu Chen and Magada El-Zarki

Best workshop student paper award:

• “6K Effective Resolution with 4K HEVC Decoding Capability for OMAF- compliant 360° Video Streaming“ by Alireza Zare, Alireza Aminlou and Miska M. Hannuksela

Best paper honorable mention:

• “From Theory to Practice: Improving Bitrate Adaptation in the DASH Reference Player” by Kevin Spiteri, Ramesh Sitaraman and Daniel Sparacio

Best student paper honorable mention:

• “Dynamic Input Anomaly Detection in Interactive Multimedia Services“ by Mohammed Shatnawi and Mohamed Hefeeda

The Excellence in DASH awards, sponsored by DASH-IF, went to:

1st place:

• “From Theory to Practice: Improving Bitrate Adaptation in the DASH Reference Player” by Kevin Spiteri, Ramesh Sitaraman and Daniel Sparacio

1st place:

• “Want to Play DASH? A Game Theoretic Approach for Adaptive Streaming over HTTP” by Abdelhak Bentaleb, Ali C. Begen, Saad Harous and Roger Zimmermann

2nd place:

• “Film Editing: New Levers to Improve VR Streaming“ by Savino Dambra, Giuseppe Samela, Lucile Sassatelli, Romaric Pighetti, Ramon Aparicio Pardo and Anne-Marie Pinna-Déry

3rd place:

• “MUSLIN: Achieving High, Fairly Shared QoE Through Multi-Source Live Streaming” by S. Silva, J. Bruneau-Queyreix, M. Lacaud, D. Négru and L. Réveillère

A couple of social events helped the community to relax and facilitated networking. On June 12th there was a welcome reception, on June 13th a barbecue collocated with the interactive sessions at CWI, and on June 14th a boat tour and a social dinner at HappyHappyJoyJoy.

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the conference: the authors, the keynotes and invited speakers, the steering committee, the technical program committee and the reviewers. Special thanks go to the organising committee, which has seamlessly and effectively coordinated all the aspects of the event. An amazing team! We also thank the sponsors including ACM and ACM SIGMM; the co-sponsors, including SIGCOMM, SIGMOBILE, and SIGOPS; the gold supporter Adobe, and the silver supporters YouTube, Comcast, Bitmovin, Unified Streaming, Nokia, and DASH-IF; and the host, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. Without the generous sponsorship and support from all of them, MMsys 2018 would have not been possible.

Next year, the 10th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2019) and associated workshops, will be held from June 18-21, in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA (http://www.mmsys2019.org). Michael Zink will be the general chair, and Ali C. Begen and Laura Toni the program chairs. Submit your papers before the deadline on October 31, 2018. We are looking forward to seeing you all again in Amherst next year!