Student Travel Support for the 26th ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2018 (ACM MM 2018)

This student travel grant supports about 15 graduate/undergraduate students enrolled in U.S. institutions to attend the 26th annual ACM Multimedia Conference 2018 (ACM MM 2018) to be held in Seoul, Korea October 22-26, 2018. This is the worldwide premier conference and a key world event to present and discuss scientific achievements and innovative industrial products in the field of multimedia computing. Participation in such an event allows students to learn/experience innovative research, develop professional networks, and interact with industry and academia leaders involved in practical applications and technology transfer. The opportunity will be broadcast widely to the technical community; students from underrepresented groups will be particularly encouraged to apply. The active participation in ACM Multimedia 2018 will be valuable for students to prepare for the success of their research career. Ultimately, the participation by U.S.-based students will support development of the next generation multimedia researchers and foster US competitiveness. ACM Multimedia covers a broad spectrum of technical areas, including: Understanding (Multimedia and Vision, Multimodal Analysis and Description, Deep Learning for Multimedia); Engagement (Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia, Multimedia Search and Recommendation, Social Multimedia, Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture); and Experience (Multimedia human-computer interaction and Quality of Experience, Multimedia Art, Entertainment and Culture, Multimedia for Collaboration in Education and Distributed Environments, Music, Speech and Audio Processing in Multimedia). The supported students will greatly benefit from participating in the conference, where they will interact with research leaders from a variety of disciplines and will be exposed to the most recent developments in multimedia research as showcased in keynote addresses, latest technical papers, technical demos, grand challenge competition, open source software competition, doctoral symposium, and also an interactive art program stimulating artists and computer scientists to meet and discover together the frontiers of effective communications. Further, each supported student will be paired with a senior mentor who would spend one-on-one time with the student and advise them on strengthening their current research work as well as their broader future research agenda. This will ensure that students will be actively engaged and will receive valuable advice. More details on the conference are available at ACM MM 2018 website (http://www.acmmm.org/2018/) and the proceedings of the conference will be available via the ACM Digital Library (https://dl.acm.org/). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.