Message from The First IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Databases and Data Management (IEEE-MDDM 2006) Program Co-Chairs

With the increasing amounts of accessible multimedia data and the increasing complexity of real world multimedia applications, multimedia systems require the management and delivery of extremely large bodies of multimedia data at very high rates and may require the delivery with real-time constraints. Consequently, efficient querying, searching, indexing, retrieval, and mining of multimedia data have emerged as challenging yet appealing research topics in multimedia applications to handle the temporal and spatial requirements and the rich semantics of multimedia data. The aim of The First IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Databases and Data Management (MDDM 2006) is to provide such a forum for researchers to discuss the problems and novel solutions in the management of multimedia data and multimedia databases. The target audiences will be university researchers, scientists, industry professionals, software engineers, and graduate students who need to become acquainted with new theories and technologies in multimedia data management and multimedia databases, and to all those who wish to gain a detailed technical understanding of what multimedia data management and multimedia databases involve. IEEE MDDM 2006 was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on April 8, 2006, in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2006). The papers included in this workshop reflect current trends in the multimedia database and data management research areas with topics such as Multimedia Database Management Systems, Multimedia Database Query Processing and Retrieval, and Multimedia Data Indexing and Multimedia Data Mining. Many people contributed to the success of this event. We wish to thank the Program Committee members and the external referees for their great work. Such a smooth review process could not have taken place without the help of the Web Master, Min Chen, at Florida International University. We are grateful to Dr. Le Gruenwald from NSF for accepting to give a keynote presentation. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude toward the ICDE organizers, especially the ICDE workshop chairs, Dr. Roger Barga and Dr. Xiaofang Zhou, for their help in this whole process.