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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 4th International Workshop on
Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2011)

at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on
Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE 2011)

October 14-17, 2011
Nanchang, JiangXi Province, China
http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE11/
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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. We solicit full size papers (6 pages long)
as well as posters (2 pages extended abstracts). All submissions
*must be blinded*, 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/MMVE11/ no later than June 30th,
2011. Accepted papers and demos must be presented at the workshop.
All accepted MMVE papers will be indexed in IEEE Xplore, included
as part of IEEE HAVE 2011 proceedings.

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


Important Dates
---------------
Submission Deadline: July 10th, 2011 (extended)
Acceptance Notification: August 1st, 2011
Camera Ready Version: September, 1st, 2011
Workshop Date: October, 14-17th, 2011


Organizers
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* Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
* Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany
* Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
* Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

TPC Chair:
* Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany

Publicity Co-Chairs:
* Alexandru Iosup, TU Delft, Netherland
* Jin-Yuan Jia, Tongji University, China
* Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy

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
* Markus Esch, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
* Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research, Norway
* Sebastian Holzapfel, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
* Alexandru Iosup, TU Delft, Netherland
* Jin-Yuan Jia, Tongji University, China
* Jehn-Ruey Jiang, National Central University, Taiwan
* Huaiyu (Kitty) Liu, Intel Labs, USA
* Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil
* Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium
* Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
* 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, Tokyo University of Science, Yamaguchi, Japan
* Knut-Helge Vik, Simula Research, Norway
* Marcos Vaz Salles, Cornell University, NY, USA
* Suiping Zhou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
* Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore, Singapore