Welcome to the 9th ACM Multimedia Conference, held Sept. 30-Oct.5, 2001 in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital city of Canada. This beautiful city is often called "Silicon Valley North" because of the high concentration of major telecommunications and software companies, such as NORTEL, ALCATEL, CISCO, MITEL, COREL, COGNOS, JDS Uniphase, Entrust and many others. The conference complements this setting by presenting and exploring technological and artistic advancements in multimedia. Technical issues, theory and practice, artistic and consumer innovations will bring together researchers, artists, developers, educators, performers, and practitioners of multimedia. This conference is sponsored by NTT, ALCATEL, HP, Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its special interest groups SIGMM, SIGGRAPH, and SIGCOMM.Brigitte Kerherve did a tremendous job of selecting three outstanding workshops on emerging topics. Tamer Ozsu organized an exciting plenary panel and Ketan Mayer-Patel did again a wonderful job of organizing this year's doctoral symposium. Vincent Ofia did a splendid job in chasing the authors and organizing the papers. Roger Price has been working on the electronic proceedings since 1997.