Welcome from the general chairs
It is our pleasure to welcome you to MobiMedia '09, the 5th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference. The conference was initiated in 2005 in Orlando, Florida, targeting to provide a unique international forum for researchers in the field of multimedia service access networks. In 2006 the conference landed in Europe, to the island of Sardinia. The following conference held in Nafpaktos, Greece, extended the event to three days, emphasising even more the aspects of network communication and multimedia delivery in heterogeneous network environments. Last year the event was held in Oulu, Finland, with a few parallel workshops.
Today's communications developments and transformations have made our world smaller, faster and far more informed than ever before. The amazing expansion in wireless bandwidth, the explosion of Internet users and capacity created unique expectations for mobile multimedia communications. We must strive to make our multimedia communications systems extremely portable, reliable and ubiquitous. In addition to the technical challenges, business models for utilising multimedia services efficiently need to be addressed.
The MobiMedia 2009 conference will address these issues with technical sessions focusing on video and audio coding solutions, wireless delivery mechanisms and new applications and services. In addition there are two special sessions addressing hot topics such as distributed video coding and video transmission over wireless local area networks. Panel sessions will address emerging technologies and applications. Three workshops on selected topics in the area will run in parallel.
We would like to thank all the volunteers who have shared their talent, dedication and time for the conference organisation and support as well as all our technical and financial sponsors. MobiMedia is technically sponsored by ACM and the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia. We would like to thank also our other sponsors ICST, Create-Net, Kingston University and Tekelec and all the volunteers in those organizations, who have participated and made this conference possible.
Especially we would like to thank our Local organizing chair, Bee Tang, our web manager Peter Eustace, the volunteers in the Wireless Multimedia Networking (WMN) Research Group in Kingston University and the conference co-ordinator Maria Morozova, who have done a tremendous work for the conference organization. We would like to express our gratitude to the Technical program chairs George Kormentzas, who was an excellent help in organising reviews and finalising the conference program, and Lajos Hanzo, for accepting our invitation and making his expertise available with active participation to discuss issues about the papers and the conference program. A big thanks to our publication chair Jyrki Huusko, who also shared with us his experience in organising the previous edition of the conference. Special session organisers Pierluigi Dragotti, Vladimir Stankovic and Christos Verikoukis proposed high quality sessions as part of our conference program and we would like to thank them for that. We would also like to thank the workshops chairs: Tasos Dagiuklas, Gianluca Reali, Christian Timmerer, Jyrki Huusko and Jonathan Rodriguez for their excellent activity in making the workshops possible.
It is our pleasure to have also a tutorial of excellent quality as part of the conference program and we would like to thank Prof. Fernando Pereira for his tutorial on mobile video compression. Additionally, we would like to thank Prof. Chang Wen Chan, Prof. Bernd Girod, Dr. Martin Hahn and Dr. Bart van Caenegen for keeping the valuable keynote speeches.
We hope that you will find the conference both enjoyable and valuable and, from 7th to 9th September, we invite you to enjoy the Kingston area and London.
Take time to walk along the river Thames and to visit Hampton Court Palace - Henry VIII's most famous palace, across the river, walk through Richmond Park, the largest London park, or enjoy the heart of London, 20 minutes by train from the conference venue.
We look forward to seeing you in London for Mobimedia 2009.
Maria G. Martini and Christos Politis
Mobimedia 2009 General Chairs
