Editorial

Dear readers, At this year’s ACM Multimedia Conference in Vancouver, I had the pleasure of informing the conference participants in the ACM SIGMM Business meeting about several exciting new developments related to the Springer Multimedia Systems Journal. Starting this year, we aim to put even more emphasis on acknowledging the time and effort spent by all those who contribute to the success of the Journal, through three different awards. The first award—which is from my personal understanding the most important one—is the award for the best reviewer of the year. Without the support of our highly qualified reviewers we would not be able to produce a Journal of this quality. However most of the time the reviewers remain unknown. Therefore, I am especially happy to announce that Dr. Michael Zink (University of Massachusetts Amherst) was unanimously accepted as the best reviewer of 2007 by the Journal’s Editorial Board Members during their meeting at ACM Multimedia 2008. Furthermore, Dr. Changsheng Xu (Chinese Academy of Sceinces) received the award for the best Editorial Board Member 2007. Finally, the Editorial Board will select one of the papers published during the last three years as the Editors’ Choice paper. This last award will be presented in 2009 for the first time. The number of submissions has been continuously increasing over the last few years, with 62 submissions in 2006, 87 submissions in 2007, and 90 submissions by November 1, 2008. This has allowed the Journal to publish six issues per volume/year and to be highly selective, i.e., approximately one out of five regular submissions is accepted.