Welcome to IMMERSCOM 2009
2nd International Conference
on
IMMERSIVE TELECOMMUNICATIONS
University of California, Berkeley May 27-29, 2009
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRS
Dear Participants:
Welcome to the Second International Conference on Immersive Telecommunication, IMMERSCOM 2009. As you know, this is the second conference in a series we all hope will continue for the foreseeable future as this field develops. IMMERSCOM brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners whose objective is to explore systems that facilitate Immersive Telecommunication Technologies. This entails capturing, processing, analyzing, coding, and rendering all these multimedia data in real time so that veritable communication amongst people geographically distributed can be realized. This technology promises to be the next level of INTERNET Communication. While technical challenges are many, we all believe that the component technologies have come far enough to warrant a serious venue such as this conference to exchange ideas, learn of the newest advances, and explore viable applications. The conference will take place on the University of California at Berkeley campus, and will be situated in our newest building, Sutardja Dai Hall, which houses the Center for Information Technology in Service to Society (CITRIS). It is befitting to have this conference in this new center since there is perhaps no better way to show how information technology can serve societal needs than through the communication opportunities that multimedia immersive technology promises.
We are fortunate to have three very distinguished keynote speakers presenting for us. They are Prof. Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford University; Prof. Klara Nahrstedt from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign; and Prof. A. Murat Tekalp from Koc University, Turkey. They will be discussing the very interesting and stimulating topics of social interactions in virtual reality, view-based network protocols, and 3D video streaming, respectively.
The conference assembled a Technical Program Committee (TPC) comprised of about 50 accomplished researchers in various technical areas that enabe immersive communication – including computer vision and graphics, user interfaces, multimedia signal processing and coding, and networking. We thank the committee for their support and help throughout the planning process, and in particular for their work in review of the papers. There were a total of 53 papers submitted for consideration, from which the TPC accepted 23 for inclusion in the technical program. Thus the acceptance rate was 43%. Each paper was reviewed by at least 3 TPC members. Technical sessions are to run on a single-track with all papers to be presented as 25-minute lectures. The sessions are:
Additionally, we have organized what we anticipate being a stimulating panel to discuss the future of immersive communication, and a bus tour to several south-bay sites (Cisco and Hewlett Packard) for demonstration of various commercial immersive communication technologies. We hope that the program will provide the participants a unique opportunity to exchange ideas, seek collaboration opportunities, and build communities across traditional research-area boundaries, all in the relaxing yet educational atmosphere that Berkeley provides.
We are grateful to the support we have received from ICST in organizing and structuring the meeting to help ensure IMMERSCOM 2009 is a success. We thank ACM SIGMM for their in-cooperation technical support, and IEEE Signal Processing Society for technical co-sponsorship of the conference. Additional funding has been provided by Microsoft Research, HP Laboratories, National Lambda Rail, Create-Net, CITRIS - UC Berkeley, and MediaX - Stanford, whose support has enabled us to keep the registrations costs affordable.
