Editorial note

Last year, we successfully established an annual award to honor the best article published in TOMCCAP over the course of one year, the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award. For this year’s award, all readers of TOMCCAP were invited to submit their nominations for articles published in Volume 8. All nominations were carefully examined and reviewed by the selection committee. The members of the TOMCCAP editorial board then conducted a final vote to determine the winning paper among the chosen nominees. This year, the winning article is “Exploring Interest Correlation for Peer-to-Peer Socialized Video Sharing” by Xu Cheng and Jiangchuan Liu, published in Volume 8, Issue 1. It examines architectures for large-scale video streaming systems exploiting social relations. To achieve its objective, a large study of YouTube traffic was conducted and a cluster analysis performed on the resulting data. Based on the observations made, a new approach for video prefetching based on social relations was developed. This important work bridges the gap between social media and multimedia streaming and hence combines two extremely relevant research topics. The award will be presented to the winning authors at ACM Multimedia in Barcelona and their trip is supported by SIGMM with $1000US. Congratulations to both authors! If you have recently read a TOMCCAP article published in Issue 9 that you think might be a potential candidate for next year’s best paper award, please send your nomination to my email address (steinmetz.eic@kom.tu-darmstadt.de). Please note that articles published in special issues are excluded from nomination. For more information about the award and the nomination and selection process, please visit our website http://tomccap.acm.org. Finally, I hope you will enjoy reading this special issue, which consists of two very exciting sections. Last year’s 20th anniversary of the ACM Multimedia Conference has inspired the guest editors to invite position papers by some of the most influential researchers in our field. They look back at the development of certain aspects of multimedia over the last 20 years and give some perspectives for the future. Additionally, based on an open call, four full-length papers have been reviewed and selected to extensively outline the development of particular multimedia areas. I highly recommend reading these very interesting insights which comprise the first section of this issue. According to our tradition, the second section contains invited and extended versions of the best papers from ACM Multimedia 2012.