Subject: ACM Multimedia 93 Workshop on Programming Abstractions for Distributed Multimedia Applications

From: [email-masked] (R. C. Sekar)
Date: Wed, 12 May 93 18:05:07 EDT

Call for Participation

                    ACM Multimedia 93 Workshop 
                                on 
                    Programming Abstractions for
                 Distributed Multimedia  Applications

                          August 3, 1993
                        Anaheim, California

Workshop Description

This one day workshop is aimed at identifying high-level abstractions that 
are suitable for expressing the communication and coordination needs of
distributed multimedia applications.  Today's networks support only very 
general-purpose, low-level mechanisms (based on TCP/IP or similar protocols) 
for programming such applications. This makes the task of programming 
distributed multimedia applications very complex and cumbersome.  A natural 
approach to overcome this complexity is to provide a software layer that 
customizes the general-purpose, low-level mechanisms for the specific task 
of developing distributed multi-media applications. The ease and convenience 
of application development depends crucially upon the suitability of the 
programming abstractions provided by this layer.

Experience with distributed multimedia applications so far suggests that 
there are two important classes of abstractions that address independent 
functional aspects of networked multimedia applications: session (also called 
conference) abstractions, and transport abstractions. The session abstractions 
provide mechanisms for coordinating the activities of agents involved in a 
communication session.  They may also provide mechanisms for negotiation among 
the agents to resolve conflicting policies and requirements of the agents.  
Connections among these agents are described by the transport abstractions.

The workshop addresses issues in developing effective abstractions for 
conveniently programming distributed multimedia applications, and involves 
the participation of researchers from a variety of areas including: 
multimedia communications, computer communications, information networking, 
telecommunications, real-time systems, open distributed systems, software 
engineering, and programming languages. 

Workshop Format

The workshop is organized around the following main activities: a set of 
invited talks that cover the foundations and state-of-the-art in public
network and internet based multimedia communications, and several expert 
panels focusing upon:

1. Initiation and management of sessions.

2. Specification of processing, presentation and transport
of multimedia streams.

3. Mechanisms for describing, accessing and managing 
network and application provider services.

The aspects covered under each of these topics include:
convenience and expressive power of abstractions, separation of concerns, 
security and privacy, mechanisms for policy enforcement, fault-tolerance, 
network resource optimization, extensibility and application interoperability.

Workshop Location

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Multimedia 
(sponsored by SIGBIO, SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, SIGGRAPH, SIGIR, SIGLINK, and SIGOIS)
In Anaheim, California. Participation in the workshop is free of charge, but 
participants must register for the ACM Multimedia 93 in order to attend the 
workshop.

Workshop Participation

It is our intention to limit the participation in the workshop to about
seventy. To accomplish this, workshop participation is by invitation only.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop please send a brief 
statement of interest (not exceeding two pages) to the workshop organizers
(preferably by e-mail). This statement should specify your current activities 
which are related to the workshop topics. The statements are due by June 15th, 
and notifications of acceptance to the workshop will be sent by July 1st. 
The statements of interest of the workshop participantes will be distributed 
at the workshop in order to promote communication.

Workshop Organizers

Shoshana Loeb                             R.C. Sekar  
Bellcore, 2A-267                          Bellcore, 2A-274
445 South St,                             445 South St,
Morristown, NJ, 07960                     Morristown, NJ, 07960
Phone: (201) 829-4528                     Phone: (201) 829-4609 
Fax:   (201) 829-5889                     Fax:   (201) 829-5889
email: [email-masked]                email: [email-masked]

Important Dates

Statement of interest: June  15, 1993
Notifications:         July   1, 1993
Workshop:              August 3, 1993