Welcome Note

Multimodal systems and services, enabling human-human communication as well as human-machine interaction through a number of different media, have now reached a level of maturity which allows for wide-spread applications. Examples include IP-based audio streaming and television, audio-visual conferences, multimodal information kiosks at airports or train stations, entertainment, edutainment and education systems, or smart home and office environments. Unfortunately, the number and diversity of applications does not automatically result in better services, at least from a user’s point of view. Thus, the quality experienced by users of such services has become a topic of paramount importance.

The International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) was created in 2009 as a forum to address this need, and to bring together leading professionals and scientists active in disciplines relevant to the quality experienced when using multimedia services. The rst QoMEX workshop was held in 2009 in San Diego, California and was a great success with more than 100 participants. The second workshop is held in Trondheim, Norway.

Trondheim is home of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who is host of one of Norway’s Center of Excellences – Q2S. Q2S has been running for more than 8 years and has had signi cant publications and activities within the quality area. As a result, we are happy to welcome you to Trondheim which will – we are sure – add to your personal experience of this workshop by adding the local Nordic avour.

In order to make QoMEX 2010 a workshop which does not only address quality as a topic, but also provides scienti c contributions which are of high quality themselves, minimum 4 reviewers were assigned to each submitted contribution. This has resulted in 43 accepted papers to QoMEX 2010, which corresponds to an acceptance rate of 58%. To ensure visibility and access to these contributions, all accepted papers in QoMEX 2010 (as it was with QoMEX 2009) will be part of the IEEE Xplore digital library.

Looking at the papers, you will note that some of them contain not factual descriptions of accomplished scienti c work, but topics for an in-depth – and potentially controversial – discussion. We are happy for these contributions as well, as we think that the format of a workshop is actually meant for this – inform about immature and novel ideas and develop them further with the help of others. On the other hand, some results and methods are already so mature that they can be considered as the agreed-upon state-of-the-art, and that they can be put into technical standards or recommendations. This is why we welcome the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) for the rst time as a partner in the organization of this workshop, by means of its Study Group 12 dedicated to performance, Quality of Service and Quality of Experience.

QoMEX 2010 will feature a mixture of 2 plenary sessions, 3 oral and 3 poster sessions, a special session dedicated to ITU-T Study Group 12 activities, a demonstration session organized in a cinema, as well as a special session where the novice participant has the opportunity to meet and discuss with the more mature participant – we have called this “speed coaching” an initiative to stimulate the discussion between experienced and not-so-experienced members of our community. We are particularly proud of our invited speakers John G. Beerends from TNO Telecom, The Netherlands, and Andrew B. Watson from the NASA Ames Research Center, USA, who will span the link from speech and music quality to visual quality and the vision model.

QoMEX 2010 could not have happened without the very strong support from a committed team of individuals. We would like to especially express our appreciations to the QoMEX 2010 Technical Program Co-Chairs, Peter Svensson (NTNU) and Amy Reibman (AT&T Labs) who did most of the work on the technical program which is the core centrepiece of this workshop. We would like to extend our thanks to all the chairs and members of the QoMEX 2010 Steering Committee, members of our Technical Committee, Plenary Speakers, Panel as well as our reviewers who ensured the high quality of the technical program. A list of these individuals is available on the QoMEX 2010 website (www.qomex2010.org), and we would like to express our sincere thanks for all their support.

In addition, we are grateful to our Financial Sponsors NTNU QoS, Trondheim, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin, and the PERCEVAL project, whose nancial support allowed us to limit the registration fee, while providing a good quality venue and infrastructure. Our appreciations extend to our Technical Sponsors – IEEE, ISCA, EAA, the Euro-NF Network of Excellence, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, whose various logistic help and other assistance were very important to us. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge the efforts of all submitters, contributors, and participants to QoMEX 2010, without whom this workshop would not have been possible. We hope that QoMEX 2010 will support you in your daily work activities, will provide new insights and ideas to you, and will help to link you to other colleagues in our still very young community. Finally, we hope that you will experience lots of fun during the workshop – we do our best to increase your Quality of Experience also in this respect, and it will be a multimodal one, indeed!

QoMEX 2010 General Co-Chairs Andrew Perkis
Sebastian Möller