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On behalf of the entire Organizing Committee, we wish to welcome you to the seventeen ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM Multimedia 2009), held October 19-22, 2009 at the Beijing Hotel in Beijing, China. ACM Multimedia is the premier annual event on multimedia research, technology and art. Since 1993, the conference has brought together researchers, practitioners and users from academia, industry, and government active in the broad field of multimedia in order to communicate the state-of-the-art in multimedia research, technology and art. In particular, the conference brings newest insights into the possibilities to explore and exploit old and new media (e.g., text, audio, visual, haptics), used in isolation or in a synergetic combination, in order to bring the technology facilitating the interaction and communication among humans, machines and data a significant step further. Richness of new fundamental concepts, practical tools and controversial ideas that emerged from the worldwide multimedia community in the past year is reflected in a wide variety of elements of this year's conference program. In addition to the oral and poster sessions presenting the full and short technical papers, respectively, the conference also features a plenary brave new topic session and two panel discussions bringing up the issues that are currently hot and controversial in the field of multimedia. Special role in the conference program has been reserved for the workshops held in conjunction with the main conference and meant to focus on specific multimedia-related topics, either to explore them more in depth or to promote them in the multimedia community. One key aspect of this conference that is different from most other academic conferences is its emphasis on systems and applications. To this end, the conference also includes technical demonstrations of research prototypes and systems, open source software competition, video demonstration of concepts and applications, as well as multimedia art sessions. Finally, by including the doctoral symposium and tutorials on various topics, the conference is also committed to inspire and educate junior scientists in the field and so strengthen and expand the multimedia research community for the years to come. A highlight of this year's ACM Multimedia conference is the Multimedia Grand Challenge, organized for the first time as a part of the conference program. The Multimedia Grand Challenge is a set of problems and issues from a number of industry leaders geared to engage the multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry's 2-5 year horizon for multimedia. Researchers were encouraged to submit working systems in response to the challenge to win the Grand Challenge competition. A large number of submissions were received for this first edition of the competition. The large number not only reveals the interest of the research community to address relevant real-life problems, but also reflects the high potential that we already have in the community to successfully address these problems. The Content, Applications, Systems, and Human-Centered Multimedia tracks received 305 long paper submissions (138 in Content, 75 in Applications, 56 in Systems, and 36 in Human-Centered Multimedia). Each paper was reviewed by at least three qualified reviewers in a double-blind review process. The Program Committee met on June 28, 2009 in New York to discuss the papers and make final selections for papers to be included as oral presentations in the conference program. This rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of 50 long papers: 22 in the Content track, 12 in the Applications track, 10 in the Systems track, and 6 in the Human-Centered Multimedia track. This represents an acceptance rate of 16.4% percent. The short paper program received 369 submissions. After a thorough review process, we accepted 103 papers resulting in an acceptance rate of 27.9% percent. These short papers will be presented during poster sessions at the conference. This year's sixth version of the Interactive Art Program will consist of long and short papers in the dedicated multimedia art sessions.