Embracing Open Source Multimedia Software

The open source software community has been instrumental in pushing state-of-theart advances in multimedia to millions of users. The VLC video player (www.videolan. org/vlc), for instance, incorporates the latest encoding and decoding techniques and has an average of 24 million downloads per month. The computer vision library OpenCV is widely used by governments and companies to perform automatic facial and object recognition (http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki), and Asterisk, an open source telephony software, has often been associated with the rise of voice over IP (www.asterisk.org). Acknowledging the relevance of such developments, the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (or ACM MM) has held its Open Source Software Competition every year since 2004. As an integral part of the conference, the competition seeks multimedia software contributions that are available at no cost in academic and research settings due to open source licensing agreements. This competition has steadily grown since its inception, from two finalist entries in 2004 to 14 in 2011. This article reports on the ACM Multimedia 2011 competition that took place from 28 November to 1 December in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Further information about the history of the competition is available at the ACM SIGMM portal, http://sigmm.org/Resources/ software/ossc.) In 2011, the organizers adopted new strategies to reenergize the competition. Proactive measures were taken with the intention of increasing awareness in open source communities, which are typically outside of multimedia research circles. First, the coordinators directly contacted numerous potential contributors, resulting in an unprecedented number of submissions of both established and novel projects. Second, the conference included a panel discussion on the relationship between the open source and research communities. The panel aimed at exploiting synergies between these two communities, exploring the possible benefits, and better understanding the existing challenges. Finally, the ACM SIGMM portal now includes a new section dedicated to multimedia-related open source projects to help raise the visibility of such projects within the research community (see http:// sigmm.org/Resources/software).