ICMR 2014: 4th ACM international conference on multimedia retrieval

ICMR was initially started as a workshop on challenges in image retrieval (in Newcastle in 1998 ) and later transformed into the Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) series. In 2011 the CIVR and the ACM Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval were combined into a single conference that now forms the ICMR series. The 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval took place in Glasgow, Scotland, from 1 – 4 April 2014. This was the largest edition of ICMR to date with approximately 170 attendees from 25 different countries. ICMR is one of the premier scientific conference for multimedia retrieval held worldwide, with the stated mission “to illuminate the state of the art in multimedia retrieval by bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field of multimedia retrieval .” According to the Chinese Computing Federation Conference Ranking (2013), ACM ICMR is the number one multimedia retrieval conference worldwide and the number four conference in the category of multimedia and graphics. Although ICMR is about multimedia retrieval, in a wider sense, it is also about automated multimedia understanding. Much of the work in that area involves the analysis of media on a pixel, voxel, and wavelet level, but it also involves innovative retrieval, visualisation and interaction paradigms utilising the nature of the multimedia — be it video, images, speech, or more abstract (sensor) data. The conference aims to promote intellectual exchanges and interactions among scientists, engineers, students, and multimedia researchers in academia as well as industry through various events, including a keynote talk, oral, special and poster sessions focused on re search challenges and solutions, technical and industrial demonstrations of prototypes, tutorials, research, and an industrial panel. In the remainder of this report we will summarise the events that took place at the 4th ACM ICMR conference.