The ACM SIGMM Multimodal Reasoning Workshop was held on 8–9 November 2025 at Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna) in Hybrid mode. Organised by Dr. Sriparna Saha, faculty member of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Patna and supported by ACM SIGMM, the two-day event brought together researchers, students, and practitioners to discuss the foundations, methods, and applications of multimodal reasoning and generative intelligence. The workshop registered 108 participants and featured invited talks, tutorials, and hands-on sessions by national and international experts. Sessions covered topics ranging from trustworthy AI, LLM fine-tuning, temporal and multimodal reasoning, to knowledge-grounded visual question answering and healthcare applications.
The ACM Multimedia Conference 2025, held in Dublin, Ireland from October 27 to October 31, 2025, continued its tradition as a premier international forum for researchers, practitioners, and industry experts in the field of multimedia. This year's conference marked an exciting return to Europe, bringing the community together in a city renowned for its rich cultural heritage, innovation-driven ecosystem, and welcoming atmosphere. ACM MM 2025 provided a dynamic platform for presenting state-of-the-art research, discussing emerging trends, and fostering collaboration across diverse areas of multimedia computing.
Multimedia research is framed through algorithms, datasets, and systems, but at its heart lies content that is deeply human. Few forms of content illustrate this better than classical music. Long before music becomes data to be recorded, generated, searched, or retrieved, it is imagined by composers and brought to life by performers. At ACM Multimedia 2025 in Dublin, this human origin of multimedia took centre stage in a unique social event that bridged classical music and multimedia content analysis. This event was the fourth supported by ACM SIGMM in the framework of Music Meets Science program (at CBMI'2022, CBMI'2023, CBMI'2024).
The Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluation (MediaEval) organizes interesting and engaging tasks related to multimedia data. MediaEval is proud to be supported by SIGMM. Tasks involve analyzing and exploring multimedia collections, as well as accessing the information that they contain. MediaEval emphasizes challenges that have a human or social aspect in order to support our goal of making multimedia a positive force in society. Participants in MediaEval are encouraged to submit effective, but also creative solutions to MediaEval tasks: We carry out quantitative evaluation of the submissions, but also go beyond the scores in order to obtain insight into the tasks, data, metrics.
[Multimedia systems are evolving towards AI-driven, adaptive services, leading to a natural convergence of QoE and machine intelligence. In this context, machine intelligence can empower QoE through learning-based, context-aware, and semantic-driven modelling and optimization. At the same time, QoE can guide machine intelligence by providing a human-centred objective for AI system design and evaluation; see also [11]. Looking beyond human perception, toward agent-centric and hybrid QoE, future multimedia systems increasingly require unified experience objectives that support human-AI co-experience. QoMEX'26 in Cardiff stands as a major milestone highlighting the convergence of Quality of Multimedia Experience with Machine Intelligence. This column reflects on this evolution and outlines the key challenges ahead.
The 153rd MPEG meeting took place online from January 19–23, 2026. The official MPEG press release can be found here. This report highlights key outcomes from the meeting, with a focus on research directions relevant to the ACM SIGMM community: • MPEG Roadmap • Exploration on MPEG Gaussian Splat Coding (GSC) • MPEG Immersive Video 2nd edition (new white paper)
Dear colleagues and friends, We would like to begin by sincerely thanking the SIGMM community for the trust you have placed in us. We are honored to serve as Chairs alongside a talented and dedicated team. A special thanks goes to the previous Executive Committee for their outstanding work during challenging times and for laying down a solid foundation for the future.
The 106th JPEG meeting was held online from January 6 to 10, 2025. During this meeting, the first image coding standard based on machine learning technology, JPEG AI, was sent for publication as an International Standard. This is a major achievement as it leverages JPEG with major trends in imaging technologies and provides an efficient standardized solution for image coding, with nearly 30% improvement over the most advanced solutions in the state-of-the-art. JPEG AI has been developed under the auspices of three major standardization organizations: ISO, IEC and ITU.
The last plenary meeting of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) was held online by the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) of the National Telecommunications and Information Adminsitration (NTIA) from November 18th to 22nd, 2024. The meeting was attended by 70 participants from industry and academic institutions from 17 different countries worldwide.
The 108th JPEG meeting was held in Daejeon, Republic of Korea, from 29 June to 4 July 2025.
In this Dataset Columns, we continue the tradition of the previous three columns by reviewing some of the notable events related to open datasets and benchmarking competitions in the field of multimedia in the years 2023, 2024 and 2025 from this column. This selection highlights the wide range of topics and datasets currently of interest to the community. Some of the events covered in this review include special sessions on open datasets and competitions featuring multimedia data. This review follows similar efforts from the previous editions:
This column introduces the now completed ITU-T P.1204 video quality model standards for assessing sequences up to UHD/4K resolution. Initially developed over two years by ITU-T Study Group 12 (Question Q14/12) and VQEG, the work used a large dataset of 26 subjective tests (13 for training, 13 for validation), each involving at least 24 participants rating sequences on the 5-point ACR scale. The tests covered diverse encoding settings, bitrates, resolutions, and framerates for H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and VP9 codecs. The resulting 5,000-sequence dataset forms the largest lab-based source for model development to date. Initially standardized were P.1204.3, a no-reference bitstream-based model with full bitstream access, P.1204.4, a pixel-based, reduced-/full-reference model, and P.1204.5, a no-reference hybrid model. The current record focuses on the latest additions to the series, namely P.1204.1, a parametric, metadata-based model using only information about which codec was used, plus bitrate, framerate and resolution, and P.1204.2, which in addition uses frame-size and frame-type information to include video-content aspects into the predictions.
In September 2025, it was held the second edition of the Summer School on Multimodal Foundation Models and Generative AI, which, with the support of SIGMM attracted more than 60 students and young researchers to learn, discuss and first-hand experiment in topics related to Generative AI. The event's success calls for further editions in upcoming years.
The 3rd edition of the Spring School on Social XR organised by Distributed and Interactive Systems group (DIS) at CWI in Amsterdam took place from 7 to 10 April 2025. The event attracted 30 students from different disciplines (technology, social sciences, and humanities) and countries from the world (Europe but also Canada and USA). The event was organized by Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola, Thomas Röggla, and Pablo Cesar from CWI; and Omar Niamut from TNO. Also this year, it was co-sponsored by ACM SIGMM, thanks to the founding for Special initiatives, and for the first time has been recognised as an ACM Europe Council Seasonal School.
The 152nd MPEG meeting took place in Geneva, Switzerland, from October 7 to October 11, 2025. The official MPEG press release can be found here. This column highlights key points from the meeting, amended with research aspects relevant to the ACM SIGMM community: • MPEG Systems received an Emmy® Award for the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). A separate press release regarding this achievement is available here. • JVET ratified new editions of VSEI, VVC, and HEVC • The fourth edition of Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding (V3C and V-PCC) has been finalized • Responses to the call for evidence on video compression with capability beyond VVC successfully evaluated
This report describes the CASTLE 2024 event, a collaborative effort to create a PoV 4K video dataset recorded by a dozen people in parallel over several days. The participating content creators wore a GoPro and a Fitbit for approximately 12 hours each day while engaging in typical daily activities. The event took place in Ballyconneely, Ireland, and lasted for four days. The resulting data is publicly available and can be used for papers, studies, and challenges in the multimedia domain in the coming years. A preprint of the paper presenting the resulting dataset is available on arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17116).
The 16th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (with the associated workshops: NOSSDAV 2025 and MMVE 2025) was held from March 31st to April 4th 2025, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. By choosing this location, the steering committee marked a milestone for SIGMM: MMSys became the very first SIGMM conference to take place on the African continent. This perfectly aligns with the SIGMM ongoing mission to build an inclusive and globally representative multimedia-systems community.
AI evaluation is undergoing a paradigm shift from focusing solely on algorithmic accuracy of AI models to emphasizing experience-based assessment of human interactions with AI systems. Under frameworks like the EU AI Act, evaluation now considers intended purpose, risk, transparency, human oversight, and real-world robustness alongside accuracy. Quality of Experience (QoE) methodologies may offer a structured approach to evaluate how users perceive and experience AI systems in terms of transparency, trust, control and overall satisfaction. This column gives inspiration and shared insights for both communities to advance experience-based AI system evaluation together.
The 150th MPEG meeting was held online from 31 March to 04 April 2025. The official press release can be found here. This column provides the following highlights: • Requirements : MPEG-AI strategy and white paper on MPEG technologies for metaverse • JVET : Draft Joint Call for Evidence on video compression with capability beyond Versatile Video Coding (VVC) • Video : Gaussian splat coding and video coding for machines • Audio : Audio coding for machines • 3DGH : 3D Gaussian splat coding
