Call for Doctoral Symposium Papers

ACM ICMR 2025 doctoral symposium plans to bring together Ph.D. students working on topics aligned with the topics of this year conference:

Multimedia content-based search and retrieval,
Multimedia-content-based (or hybrid) recommender systems,
Large-scale and Web-scale multimedia retrieval,
Multimedia content extraction, analysis, and indexing,
Multimedia analytics and knowledge discovery,
Multimedia machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks,
Relevance feedback, active learning, and transfer learning,
Fine-grained retrieval for multimedia,
Event-based indexing and multimedia understanding,
Semantic descriptors and novel high- or mid-level features,
Crowdsourcing, community contributions, and social multimedia,
Multimedia retrieval leveraging quality, production cues, style, framing, and affect,
Synthetic media generation and detection,
Narrative generation and narrative analysis,
User intent and human perception in multimedia retrieval,
Query processing and relevance feedback,
Multimedia browsing, summarization, and visualization,
Multimedia beyond video, including 3D data and sensor data,
Mobile multimedia browsing and search,
Multimedia analysis/search acceleration, e.g., GPU, FPGA,
Benchmarks and evaluation methodologies for multimedia analysis/search,
Privacy-aware multimedia retrieval methods and systems,
Fairness and explainability in multimedia analysis/search,
Legal, ethical and societal impact of multimedia retrieval research,
Applications of multimedia retrieval, e.g., news/journalism, media, medicine, sports, commerce, lifelogs, travel, security, and environment.

We encourage contributions from students working in the full space of these topics, which is defined by dimensions including:

Content: image, video, music, spoken audio, sensor data;
Tasks: retrieval, recommendation, summarization, multimedia mining;
Multiple modalities: multimodal fusion, cross-media retrieval;
Algorithms: memory-based, rule-based, model-based, deep learning;
Retrieval pipeline: hashing, indexing, representation, similarity metrics, query interpretation, results presentation;
Interaction: relevance feedback, conversational and emotional interfaces;
Relevance Criteria: topic, style, quality, intent;
Challenges: large-scale data, fine-grained retrieval, evaluation, interfaces, crowdsourcing, privacy, new applications.

The doctoral symposium will take place during the main conference in a dedicated oral session. The goal is to provide a forum for Ph.D. students to present ongoing research in a collaborative environment and to share ideas with other renowned and experienced researchers. Participants will discuss their research ideas and results, and they will receive constructive feedback from an audience consisting of peers as well as more senior people. It will be an excellent opportunity for developing person-to-person networks to the benefit of the Ph.D. students in their future careers and also of the community.

The Ph.D. students of the accepted doctoral symposium papers coming at the conference to present solely their doctoral symposium paper will be entitled to a student registration fee for the entire conference.

Eligibility

Prospective student attendees should already have a clear direction for research, and possibly have published some results. Preference will be given to students who have advanced to Ph.D. candidacy.

Maximum Length of a Paper

Each doctoral symposium paper should not be longer than 4 pages.

Important Dates

Check out here.

Single-Blind Review

ACM ICMR will use a single-blind review process for doctoral symposium paper selection. Authors should provide author names and affiliations in their manuscript. Selections will be based on the submitted 4 pages paper, singly authored by the student wishing to attend. Submissions will be reviewed by the Doctoral Symposium Committee (appointed by the Doctoral Symposium Chairs). Accepted proposals will be published in the conference proceedings. Doctoral students who submit to the Doctoral Symposium are encouraged to submit a paper on their research to the main conference. However, acceptance for participation in the Doctoral Symposium will be based solely on the paper written ad-hoc for the event. All papers will be reviewed with respect to overall quality of presentation, potential for future impact of the research on the field, and expected benefit to the other doctoral students attending the conference.

Submission Instructions

Applications to the Doctoral Symposium should include a 4 pages paper summarizing the applicant’s dissertation research. The paper should include:

Abstract and the keywords;
Motivation, problem description;
Background and related work (including key references);
Novelty and significance relative to the state of the art;
Approach, data, methods and proposed experiments;
Results obtained and work in progress;
Specific research issues for discussion at the Doctoral Symposium.

In addition to the paper, the applicants are expected to provide a 1 page appendix that should describe the benefits that would be obtained by attending the Doctoral Symposium, including:

A statement by the student saying why they want to attend the Symposium;
A statement by their advisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Symposium.

Advisors should also specifically state whether the student has written, or is close to completing, a thesis proposal (or equivalent), and when they expect the student would defend their dissertation if they progress at a typical rate.

The appendix should be uploaded as a separated file. See the Paper Submission section.

Presentation Format

ACM ICMR 2025 will be an in-person event. All oral talks and demonstrations must be on-site at the conference venue, otherwise they will be removed from the proceedings and no refund given. This includes full papers, BNI papers and doctoral symposium papers. Posters should be presented at the conference, but we will also facilitate online posters using our online conference platform. This platform requires the upload of a poster and short accompanying video. We will be strictly enforcing this policy across all submission types.

Contact

For any questions regarding demo submissions, please email the Doctoral Symposium Chair: Ramanathan Subramanian