Following on the recent Workshop on Video Analytics at IEEE VisWeek 2009, we are pleased to announce the following special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications on Multimedia Analytics. Please consider submitting a paper and tell your students and colleagues about this opportunity. Special Issue on Multimedia Analytics IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Submission deadline: 13 Jan. 2010 Target publication date: Sep./Oct. 2010 Multimedia make up 95 percent of the digital universe, and the percentage is growing. Most of these media are unstructured or, at best, semistructured, so it's hard to retrieve, analyze, and understand their content. Multimedia are now the main components of online news, blogs, medical imagery, general picture databases, scientific data, patient or health records, and many other types of digital collections. This special issue will focus on current tools and research in this very challenging and important area. Work on video analytics, either by itself or as part of multimedia analysis, is of special interest as are exploratory interactive visualization methods. Possible topics include, but aren't limited to, · user interfaces for multimedia analysis that optimize cognition; · tools for exploring multimedia collections; · applications that categorize multimedia based on content; · capabilities to fuse multimedia content into one conceptual space; · annotation schema for multimedia analysis; · automated or social methods of annotating multimedia for improved retrieval; · image, speech, soundtrack, and text processing that supports analysis of large multimedia collections; · methods for handling real-time or streaming multimedia; · methodologies for determining originator, message, and audience impacts of multimedia; and · applications that support reporting multimedia analysis results in a multimedia format. A workshop on video analytics to be held at IEEE VisWeek 2009 (http://vis.computer.org/VisWeek2009) will provide context for the importance of multimedia analytics and for some of these topics. We expect that a report on the outcomes of the workshop will appear in this issue of CG&A or in an issue around this time. Articles should be no more than 8,000 words, with each figure counting as 200 words. Cite only the 12 most relevant references, and consider providing technical background in sidebars for nonexpert readers. Color images are preferable and should be limited to a total of 10. You can find CG&A style and length guidelines at www.computer.org/cga/author.html. Please submit your article using the online manuscript submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your article, select the appropriate special-issue title under the category "Manuscript Type." Also include complete contact information for all authors. If you have any questions about submitting your article, contact the peer-review coordinator at cga-ma@computer.org. Please direct any correspondence before submission to the guest editors: Nancy Chinchor, nancyc@rccb.osis.gov; William Ribarsky, ribarsky@uncc.edu; and Michael Christel, christel@cs.cmu.edu ----------- Dr. William Ribarsky Bank of America Endowed Chair in Information Technology Chair, Computer Science Department Director, Charlotte Visualization Center College of Computing and Informatics University of North Carolina at Charlotte www.viscenter.uncc.edu