Call for Grand Challenge

The Call for Grand Challenges period is over, if you want to submit a paper to an ACMMM Grand Challenge, please check out the list of accepted grand challenges.

ACM Multimedia is the premier international conference in the area of multimedia within the field of computer science. The 2025 ACM Multimedia conference takes place in Dublin. Ireland, from 27 October – 31 October 2025. Multimedia research focuses on technologies that enable the use and exchange of content integrating the multiple perspectives of different digital modalities, including images, text, video, audio, speech, music, and sensor data.

ACM Multimedia is calling for proposals for Grand Challenges in 2025. The Multimedia Grand Challenge was first presented as part of ACM Multimedia 2009 and has established itself as a prestigious venue for competition in the multimedia community. The purpose of the Multimedia Grand Challenge is to engage the multimedia research community by establishing well-defined and objectively judged challenges intended to exercise state-of-the-art methods and inspire future research directions.

Proposers with an innovative idea of a Multimedia Grand Challenge should gather an organisational team with the capacity to carry out the organisation of the challenge and submit a proposal according to the instructions below. It is important to emphasise the continuity of the Grand Challenge, which is important to support sustained and substantial progress in the state of the art. We ask that organiser teams who would like to propose Grand Challenges express a commitment to organize their Grand Challenge multiple years in a row.

The key criteria for Grand Challenges are that they should be useful, and interesting, and their solution should involve a series of research tasks over a long period of time, with pointers toward longer-term research.

A Multimedia Grand Challenge proposal should include:

A brief description to explain why the challenge problem is important and relevant to the multimedia research community, industry, and society over (at least) the next 3-5 years.
A description of a specific set of research tasks or sub-tasks to tackle the challenge problem in the long run.
An outline of current state-of-the-art techniques and why this Grand Challenge would help accelerate research in this important area.
Link to sites containing relevant datasets to be used for objective training and evaluation of the grand challenge tasks. Documentation on the datasets should be provided or made accessible.
A description of rigorously defined objective criteria and/or procedures on how the submissions will be evaluated or judged.
A commitment to publish and maintain a website related to their specific Grand Challenge containing the information, datasets, and tasks for the Grand Challenge for at least the next 3 years.
Work with ACM Multimedia Conference organisers to publicize the Grand Challenge tasks to researchers for participation.
Contact information of at least two organizers who will be responsible for organizing, publicizing, reviewing, and judging the Grand Challenge submissions as described in the proposal.

Note that although we ask organisers to express a multi-year commitment to their Grand Challenge, the Challenge will still undergo a new review each year. Priority will be given to Grand Challenges which have been successful in the past and are clearly contributing to continuity.

Important Dates

The following are the important dates for this call:

14th February 2025 – Deadline for submission of workshop/tutorial/grand challenge proposals
28th February 2025 – Notification for workshop/tutorial/grand challenge proposals

Submission

Please submit by email to grandchallenge@acmmm2025.org by the due date.

Contacts

For any questions, please contact the Grand Challenge Chairs: <grandchallenge@acmmm2025.org>:

Minh-Son Dao (NICT)
Minh-Triet Tran (VNU HCM University of Science)
Hongxia Xie (Jiling University)