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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 3rd International Workshop on
Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2010)

at the 7th ACM International Conference on
Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2010)

November 19, 2010
Taipei, Taiwan
http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE10/
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Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) systems are spatial
simulations that provide real-time human interactions among thousands
to millions of concurrent users. MMVEs have experienced phenomenal
growth in recent years in the form of massively multiplayer online games
(MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage, and social communities
such as Second Life and Hobbo Hotel. The technical aspect of designing,
developing, and deploying them is highly interdisciplinary and involves
experts from many domains, including graphics, networking, protocol and
architecture designs. The MMVE workshop intends to provide a forum for
both academic researchers and industry developers to investigate the
architectural and system support for MMVEs. By gathering experts under
one roof, we wish to discuss their findings, incite collaborations, and
move the state of the art forward.


Topics
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The workshop seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners
in the field, and encourages discussions based on the presented papers
to identify current and future research topics.

Some key and emerging issues we would especially like to solicit are:

1. The integration with casual, social networking systems.

Recently there has been a surge of casual social games on social
networking sites such as Facebook, with tens of millions of active
users. While many of them are not yet real-time in nature, providing
massive real-time interactions may only be a matter of time. How will
such systems emerge or be designed? Additionally, many 3D chatrooms /
instant messengers are now appearing (e.g., IMVU, Club Cooee, Game Xiu).
While most interactions are limited as room-based small-group
interactions, the total concurrent users may also reach critical sizes
given their casual nature (e.g., IMVU has already over 1 million active
accounts). How should such systems be supported and scale?

2. The adoption of parallelism to increase scale.

Fast GPU and multi-core processors are now becoming common commodity.
How will this hardware trend impact MMVE server-cluster design? And how
should P2P approaches for MMVE take advantage of the increased power at
client-side? Additionally, home set-top boxes with large local storage
and broadband Internet connections are becoming household commodities,
how will this trend impact the ways MMVEs be delivered (perhaps via
content streaming) or architected?

3. Interoperable MMVE standards and protocols.

As the market for virtual world increases and matures, efforts to
provide interoperable user experience across multiple virtual
environments have also intensified. For example, initiatives are ongoing
to form IETF working groups on defining virtual world standard protocols
(e.g., MMOX and VWRAP ). Part of any standard process is the
identification of common features and requirements. What are the common
features and requirements in MMVE that may be modeled and abstracted to
facilitate such standardization effort? And are there working protocols
that already exist in current systems? We would like to invite such
experience sharing and discussions.

The workshop thus will address the following issues:

1. Scalability: the ability to handle at least thousands of concurrent
users, interacting via Internet.

2. Interactivity: how to provide responsive, near real time interactions
despite latency and jitter.

3. Consistency: providing consistent views for users, despite the
inherent delay in state updates.

4. Persistency: the ability to save and access the world states despite
disconnections and failures.

5. Security and privacy: distributed algorithms that allow secure
interactions and privacy guarantees.

6. Interoperability: integration of multiple systems or providers with
common protocols or clients.

7. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) devices: the integration of mobile
devices for nomadic systems.

8. Self-organizing architectures: load balancing and fault tolerance
without manual configurations.

9. Content streaming: voice communication and 3D content streaming.

10. Implementation issues: novel approaches to effectively manage the
complexity of development.


Submission Guidelines
----------------------

Paper submissions must cover one of the topics listed above, or a
closely- related one. Submitted papers should be at most 6 pages long
and *must be blinded*. Research papers must be original prior
unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. All submissions will be
peer-reviewed (double-blind) and selected based on their originality,
merit, and relevance to the workshop.

Submissions in PDF format must be submitted online through the workshop
page at http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE10/ no later than August 30th,
2010. Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Accepted papers
will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Advanced
Media and Communications (IJAMC).

If you have any questions, please email us at mmve@peers-at-play.org.


Important Dates
---------------
Submission Deadline: September 13th, 2010 (extended)
Acceptance Notification: October 4th, 2010
Camera Ready Version: October, 11th, 2010
Workshop Date: November, 19th, 2010


Organizers
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TPC Co-Chairs:
* Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
* Jeffrey Kesselman, Blue fang Games, USA

Steering Committee:
* Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany
* Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
* Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany


Technical Program Committee
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Maha Abdallah, University of Paris VI, France
Dewan T. Ahmed, University of Ottawa, Canada
Christian Bouville, IRISA, France
Romain Cavagna, University of Paris VI, France
Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Chris GauthierDickey, University of Denver, USA
Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research, Norway
Behnoosh Hariri, University of Ottawa, Canada
Aaron Harwood, University of Melbourne, Australia
Sebastian Holzapfel, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Jehn-Ruey Jiang, National Central University, Taiwan
Stephan Krause, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Jay Lorch, Microsoft Research, USA
Pedro Morillo Tena, University of Valencia, Spain
Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil
Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium
Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
Simon Rieche, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Ingo Scholtes, University of Trier, Germany
Gwendal Simon, TELECOM Bretagne, France
Richard Suselbeck, Univ. Mannheim, Germany
Shinichi Ueshima, Kansai University, Japan
Matteo Varvello, Alcatel-Lucent (Holmdel, NJ), USA
Shinya Yamamoto, NIST, Japan
Knut-Helge Vik, Simula Research, Norway
Suiping Zhou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore, Singapore