ACM Multimedia 2005 started at the Hilton in Singapore. About 350 researchers in multimedia are attending this premier research conference in multimedia.
This year I find more papers on Multimedia compared to only on one media. This is a good trend. Hopefully it continues. Some people did come to me and commented that they used to think earlier only about (say) audi, but now they think about audio and other information.
Some other trends that were clear on the first day: context is getting more attention, metadata remains a buzz word, network of video and other sensors is coming to main stream, multimedia search remains the most popular topic but it is clear that it remains a difficult task, academia seems to be getting more influenced by the folksonomy culture than it was a year ago, learning based approaches remain popular.
It is always nice hear vision talks from industry. The keynote here was from NHK and presented a nice futurisitic view of the nature of revolutions taking place in Broadcasting (at Japan Broadcasting corp). Again, there was an emphasis on tags.
It is always nice to meet frinds and this conference is one of the friendliest places for me — afterall I am the Sig Multimedia Chair so have many friends here.