On behalf of the Organizing Committee, it is our humble pleasure to invite/welcome you to Toronto and to the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2006). We consider ourselves fortunate to have had the opportunity to organize this 7th ICME and offer you a taste of Canadian hospitality.
We are thrilled to see that this year ICME draw a record number of 1022 paper submissions. We are fortunate to have the invaluable cooperation of our colleagues as Technical Program Committee (TPC) Co-Chairs, Professors Chang Wen Chen and Kostas Plataniotis, and TPC Vice Chairs representing the four participating IEEE Societies, Dr. Mike Christel (Computer), Dr. Jean-Luc Dugelay (Signal Processing), Professor Panos Nasiopoulos (Circuits and Systems) and Professor En-hui Yang (Communications), who put together a rich in content and high-quality technical program spanning three full days of six lecture and four poster sessions running in parallel and covering 10 different tracks, representing the technical activities in multimedia in the four Societies. In the program are included 10 special sessions and one demo session.
On the day before the conference starts, we offer seven high quality tutorials on several important aspects of multimedia. The conference features four keynote speeches offered by our distinguished speakers: Ray J.K. Liu, on “Multimedia Forensics: Where Sherlock Holmes Meets Hollywood”, Tas Venetsanopoulos, on “Multimedia Signal Processing and Content-Based Image Retrieval (a Survey)” Sun-Yuan Kung, on “Machine Learning for Multi-Modality Genomic Data Mining” and Thomas Huang, on “Ten Challenge Problems in Content-based Image and Video Retrieval”.
In addition to the technical program, we have also put together a social program that will at least keep you busy: a welcome reception in the hosting hotel, and the formal conference reception and banquet in 360 Restaurant on CN Tower, the tallest free standing structure on this planet.
We want to share with you our gratitude towards all members of the organizing committee for their dedication to the success of ICME 2006. Working like one person for a common goal in the demanding task of ICME organization made us proud that we got involved in this effort. For this, we thank them all.
We would like to thank Microsoft Research and IBM Research for their sponsorships to the Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award. We would also like to thank Ryerson Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Science and Ryerson University for their generous support and army of volunteers.
We are very grateful to Conference Management Services, Inc, for making our work as organizers as easy as it could be and for offering their unique ideas and initiatives for us all to enjoy.
We would like to invite you to visit Toronto, your first time in Canada with ICME, especially at this time of the year when nature is welcoming everybody, and enjoy both the rich technical program and the endless opportunities to explore the place and the culture. We hope your stay here will be both rewarding and memorable.
Ling Guan, Hong-Jiang Zhang
ICME 2006 General Co-Chairs