Welcome Message from the QoMEX 2020 Chairs

The International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) provides an
annual forum for experts from academia and industry to present and discuss current and
future research on multimedia quality, quality of experience (QoE) and user experience (UX).
The 12 th edition, in 2020, is a conference unlike any that has gone before it. As a result of the
global COVID-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions, QoMEX2020 will be held
online as a virtual event. Without the planned “céad míle fáilte” or one hundred thousand
welcomes for visitors to Athlone, Ireland, our aim is that the high quality technical
programme and adapted social events will deliver a novel and memorable experience for all
attendees.

Curating an online conference programme is very different from a face-to-face event.
Ensuring that technical issues do not stall the programme necessitated preparation of
presentations in advance by authors, and they should be commended for their efforts in
these challenging times. We have strived to maintain a level of interaction throughout the
programme with plenary speakers, authors and delegates being provided with novel
methods for communication and discussion.

As a result of the online format, the programme duration was curtailed to maintain the QoE.
Additionally, many of the novel additions to the programme had to be adapted and
condensed, such as social mixers, the early career mentoring, the industry demo sessions,
and diversity and inclusion travel grants. However, a strong technical programme remains
and contains a mix of the regular areas of multimedia QoE, emerging topics including point
clouds, data-driven machine learning methods and immersive QoE.

Thanks to the technical programme committee for all their work in providing rigorous and
constructive peer reviews during what turned out to be a period of unprecedented upheaval
as we all adjusted to working from home. This year saw the largest number of full paper
submissions in the conference’s 12 year history in addition to short, dataset and tools and
industry/demo paper tracks. It has also seen the largest number of registered attendees in
the history of the conference with over 300 participants. We are delighted to welcome both
new and returning attendees to QoMEX.

The invited plenary speakers will deliver keynotes on a complementary set of emerging QoE
topics. Stephen Brewster (University of Glasgow) will talk about how sound can be used to
form novel user experiences by creating ‘personal audio spaces’. Hayley Hung (Delft
University of Technology ) will challenge us to further embrace interdisciplinary research
approaches between social and computer sciences, in order to understand and measure
social interaction quality via unconventional approaches to multimodal data processing. Mel
Slater’s (University of Barcelona) keynote introduces three illusions of virtual reality: place,
plausibility and body ownership, and discusses their far reaching consequences and
examples of their measurement.

The year-to-year sustainability of the conference is managed by the QoMEX Steering
Committee (SC) and is technically sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and
Qualinet. The QoMEX 2020 edition is handled by an international organizing committee. We
would like to extend our thanks to the SC for their guidance and advice. We wish ChristianTimmerer (co-chair), Peter Schelkens (co-chair) and Sebastian Möller (treasurer) best
wishes on their recent appointments on the QoMEX Steering Committee. On behalf of the
wider QoMEX community, a sincere thanks Touradj Ebrahimi, Andrew Perkis and Lina
Karam for their outstanding service and commitment as steering committee officers over the
past 12 years. Finally, we are very grateful to our diamond supporters Netflix, YouTube
and Deutsche Telekom, our silver supporters Bitmovin, Neueda Technologies Ireland
Ltd., and Sidero Ltd. and our other supporters ACM SIGMM and Fáilte Ireland.

We wish all attendees an enjoyable conference with fruitful discussions and interactions.

Conference Co-Chairs
Andrew Hines, University College Dublin
Niall Murray, Athlone Institute of Technology

TPC Chairs
Mylene C. Q. Farias, University of Brasília (UnB)
Anil Kokaram, Trinity College Dublin
Alexander Raake, TU Ilmenau