Call for Open-Source Software Competition Proposals

Submission System: https://openreview.net/group?id=acmmm.org/ACMMM/2023/Track/Open_Source

ACM Multimedia is the flagship conference in the multimedia area within the field of computer science. Multimedia research focuses on systems and technologies that enable the use and exchange of multi-modal contents, including video, audio, AR/VR, haptics, smell, images, text, speech, music, and sensor data.

The Open-Source Software Competition is an important part of the ACM Multimedia program. The competition, now in its 18th edition, is intended to celebrate, encourage and promote the contribution of researchers, software developers, and educators to advance the field by providing the community with implementations of codecs, middleware, frameworks, toolkits, libraries, multimedia players, applications, authoring tools, and other multimedia software. These resources advance the field by providing a common set of tools for building and improving multimedia research prototypes. The use of these tools also allows others to replicate research results more easily.

To qualify, the software must be provided with source code and all needed licenses in such a manner that the software can be used free of charge in academic and research settings. As part of the review process, the software will be built from the sources. All source code, license, installation instructions, and other documentation must be available on a public web page or on publicly available software repositories such as GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. License compatibility with other open-source software is encouraged. Dependencies on non-open source third-party software are discouraged, with the exception of operating systems and freely available commercial packages.

Authors are encouraged to prepare as much documentation as possible, including examples of how the provided software might be used, existing prototypes that use the software, video demos, download statistics, or other public usage information. Entries will be selected for inclusion in the conference program based on peer review. The criteria for judging submissions include broad applicability and potential impact, novelty, technical depth, demo suitability, and other miscellaneous factors (e.g., maturity, popularity, compatibility with commonly used programming languages, no dependence on closed source, documentation quality, etc.)

Authors of selected entries will be invited to present and demonstrate their software as part of the regular conference program. In addition, accepted overview papers will be included in the conference proceedings. An overall winning entry, as judged by reviewers and the program committee, will be recognized formally at ACM Multimedia 2023

Note that it is not necessary that papers in this track have large-scale experimental results or comparisons to the state-of-the-art since it is expected that large, publicly available datasets may not be available, and there may be no existing approaches to which the proposed approach in the paper can be compared.

Submission Guidelines

 Authors interested in submitting an entry to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition should make their software contribution available by providing a public URL for download and prepare a package containing the following information to be submitted via the online submission system under the Open Source Software Competition track:

  • A PDF file containing a 4-page max paper including an overview of the open-source software package, its description, applications, intended audience, main features, etc. This overview paper should be prepared using the same guidelines and formatting as technical papers, although due to the nature of this submission, reviews will not be double-blind. Authors will be required to assign the copyright to the ACM.
    • The PDF file should include the permanent link for the open-source software (e.g., GitHub, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, Google Code, SVN).
    • The PDF file should also include a link to a compressed archive file that contains the software.

Authors are strongly encouraged to ease the task of testing and building their code using containers or VMs, e.g., using Docker or Vagrant, or using packet manager systems, e.g., NuGet, CPM, BiiCode, Maven, Bower, etc.

The compressed archive file with all source code, documentation, build/install instructions, and licenses must be placed in a web-accessible location. The public URL for the project page where software, documentation, and open-source license can be found must be included in the overview paper. Comprehensive and clear build/install instructions will be a crucial component of any submission. The evaluation committee will make a reasonable effort to build the software, but if they are unable to make the software run, it will be excluded from the competition.

These documents should be submitted through the submission system.

Important Dates

The submission deadline is at 11:59 p.m. of the stated deadline date Anywhere on Earth.
 
Submission deadline:
8 June 2023
 
Notification of Acceptance: 15 July 2023
28 July 2023
 
Camera Ready deadline:
6 August 2023

Contacts

For any questions regarding submissions, please email the Open-Source Competition Chairs:

Wei Cai: caiwei@cuhk.edu.cn

Mohamed Hefeeda: mhefeeda@sfu.ca