The Brave New Ideas Track of ACM Multimedia 2016 is calling for innovative papers that open up new vistas for multimedia research. Submissions should be scientifically rigorous and also introduce fresh perspectives. We expect a BNI paper to stimulate activity towards addressing new, long term challenges of interest to the multimedia research community. We welcome submissions of multi-disciplinary papers.

The theme for this year’s Brave New Ideas Track: “The Societal Impact of Multimedia Research”. The way we define “brave” and “new” are closely tied to this year’s theme.

We understand “brave” to mean that the paper (or the area of research introduced by the paper) has clear potential for high societal impact. For the proposed algorithm, technology or application to be understood as high impact, the authors should be able to argue that their proposal is important to solving problems or to providing services that directly affect people’s lives. Arguments can include:

the number of people potentially positively impacted by the proposed idea,
the projected readiness of people to use it, pay for it, or recommend it to others,
the fact that the people benefiting from the idea are conventionally under-served,
estimates of the economic loss that can be expected to occur if the problem addressed by the idea remains unsolved.
We expect the paper to make an argument for high societal impact in the introductory section.

We understand “new” to mean an idea that has not yet been proposed. The component techniques and technologies may exist, but their integration must be novel. The paper should enable the reader to easily see how multimedia technology engenders societal impact in a new way.