It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2015 ACM MULTIMEDIA Conference, the premier conference for multimedia experts and practitioners from across academia and industry. This year we are in beautiful Brisbane, Australia, our first time in this wonderful country and we're delighted to be here and looking forward to experiencing some of the delights and treasures this great country has to offer.
This year's conference is the 23rd in the annual series continues our tradition to bring together a wide and diverse set of activities including panel sessions, tutorials, a series of workshops, technical demos, an open source software competition, a doctoral symposium, an interactive art exhibition, a video program and of course scientific papers and posters including special sessions on brave new ideas and grand challenges, as well as "regular" topics. What a busy week we are going to have!
One of the great parts of the program that we have lined up for you is the two keynote talks. On Tuesday October 27th, Judy Kay from the University of Sydney will talk about "Harnessing Big Personal Data, with scrutable user modeling for privacy and control", bringing her extensive background in Human-Computer Interaction to the really topical issue of personal data, and how to manage and use it for good and practical purposes. On Thursday October 29th, Zhengyou Zhang from Microsoft Research will talk about "Vision-enhanced Immersive Interaction and Remote Collaboration with Large Touch Displays" where he will address issues like telepresence and computer supported cooperative work and how those technologies have, and continue to develop.