Call for Papers

The desire to gain access to advanced multimedia content anywhere, anytime, and with any device is still growing. The resulting research issues and standardization activities are covered under the umbrella of Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) and Universal Multimedia Experience (UME) respectively. The following specific challenges are involved, which result in corresponding "building blocks" of a UMA-enabled system:

• authoring rich, multimodal, and scalable multimedia content for distribution over various channels;
• providing multimedia content descriptions, i.e., metadata conveying, e.g., the available content variants or adaptation options;
• providing descriptions of the delivery context, i.e., of user preferences, usage environment, device capabilities, and network characteristics;
• negotiating, selecting, converting, adapting multimedia content (on both syntactic and semantic levels), and/or personalizing graphical user interfaces and applications;
• managing and enforcing digital rights;

The primary goal of UMA/UME is to provide the best quality of service (QoS) or user experience with regard to the actual circumstances. The building blocks as mentioned above can be used to build an End-to-End QoS-aware system to cope with the scenarios required by UMA/UME.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are working on different aspects of UMA/UME, ranging from multimedia content production and delivery – including adaptation – in both streaming and non-streaming scenarios to UMA/UME system design and its applications. This workshop targets papers on both theoretical and practical points of view.

Areas of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

• Automatic multimedia content production; content-related metadata providing End-to-End QoS support
• Multimedia content adaptation; scalability, analysis, and optimization
• Metadata-driven adaptation in streaming and constrained environments
• Modeling UMA framework; device independence; coding-format independence
• Evaluation metrics of the adapted contents; quality of experience (QoE)
• Standards supporting UMA: MPEG-7/21, W3C, IETF, etc.
• UMA application such as content provider application, end user application, network applications, mobile application, broadcast application, etc.

Important dates:

• Submission due: 10th September 2006
• Notification of Acceptance / Reviewer’s comments: 30th September 2006
• Camera ready version: 20th October 2006

All submissions and proposals are to be in English and submitted in PDF format by email to christian(dot)timmerer(at)itec(dot)uni-klu(dot)ac(dot)at. Document style is available at the conference website under http://www.axmedis.org/axmedis2006/call4papers.html.