Multimedia Big Data

T he First IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (BigMM 2015) took place at the Chinese National Convention Center in Beijing, China, from 20–22 April 2015. This conference was jointly sponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing (TCMC) and IEEE Technical Committee on Semantic Computing (TCSEM) and was hosted by Peking University. The motivation for organizing the BigMM conference is the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications—including video-on-demand, interactive video systems, surveillance, social media, medicine, and healthcare—making multimedia the “biggest big data” and an important source of insights and information. In a broader sense, multimedia big data is emerging as the next “must have” competency in our society. As an active and interdisciplinary research field, multimedia big data also presents challenges and opportunities for multimedia computing in the big data era. The BigMM conference thus aims to foster the growth of a new research community, acting as an international forum for researchers and practitioners in academia and industry to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of multimedia big data, identifies emerging research topics, and defines the future of the field. The theme of BigMM 2015 was “Multimedia: The Biggest Big Data.” The technical program consisted of invited talks, oral and poster presentations, panels, a summit, a grand challenge, and several featured workshops. More than 120 participants attended this conference.