--------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS

The 5th International Workshop on
Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2012)

at the IEEE International Symposium on
Audio-Visual Environments and Games (HAVE 2012)

October 8, 2012
Munich, Germany
http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE12/
--------------------------------------------------------

Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) systems are spatial
simulations that provide real-time human interactions among thousands to
millions of concurrent users. MMVEs have experienced phenomenal growth
in recent years in the form of massively multiplayer online games
(MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage, and social communities
such as Second Life and Hobbo Hotel. The technical aspect of designing,
developing, and deploying them is highly interdisciplinary and involves
experts from many domains, e.g., graphics, networking, protocol and
architecture designs. The MMVE workshop intends to provide a forum for
both academic researchers and industry developers to investigate the
architectural and system support for MMVEs. By gathering experts under
one roof, we wish to discuss their findings, incite collaborations, and
move the state of the art forward.

Topics
------
The workshop seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners
in the field, and will encourage discussions based on the presented
papers to identify current and future research topics. We are
particularly interested in raising discussions about the following
questions:

1. How is MMVE technology developed for games reused for distributed
virtual environment in other domains, such as training?

2. How do the life-cycles and payment models of games integrated into
social networking systems (Facebook etc) influence game development?

3. How can MMVE technology leverage parallel computing technology,
including multicore (Cell, GPU), tight clustering (transactional
memory, distributed shared memory) and distributed systems (P2P,
Clouds)?

The workshop addresses the following MMVE topics:

1. Scalability, the ability to handle at least thousands of concurrent
users, interacting via Internet.
2. Interactivity, how to provide responsive, near real time interactions
despite latency and jitter.
3. Consistency, providing consistent views for users, despite the
inherent delay in state updates.
4. Persistence, the ability to save and access the world states despite
disconnections and failures.
5. Security and privacy, distributed algorithms that allow secure
interactions and privacy guarantees.
6. Interoperability, integration of multiple systems or providers with
common protocols or clients.
7. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) devices, the integration of mobile
devices for nomadic systems.
8. Self-organizing architectures, load balancing and fault tolerance
without manual configurations.
9. Content streaming, voice communication and 3D content streaming,
incremental deployment and updating.
10. Implementation issues, novel approaches to address development
challenges.

Submission Guidelines
----------------------

Paper submissions must cover one of the topics above or a
closely-related one. We solicit full size papers (6 pages) as well as
posters (2 page extended abstract). All submissions must be blinded,
must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere.
All submissions will be peer-reviewed (double-blind) and selected based
on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Please
submit at: http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE12/, and e-mail
mmve@peers-at-play.org for any inquiries. Accepted papers and demos must
be presented at the workshop and will be indexed in IEEE Xplore,
included as part of IEEE HAVE 2012 proceedings.

Important Dates
---------------
Submission Deadline: July 10th, 2012
Acceptance Notification: August 1st, 2012
Camera Ready Version: September, 1st, 2012
Workshop Date: October, 8th 2012


Organizers
----------
* Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
* Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore
* Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany
* Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
* Arno Wacker, University of Kassel, Germany

TPC Chair:
* Carsten Griwodz, University of Oslo

Publicity Co-Chairs:
* Herman Engelbrecht, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
* Jin-Yuan Jia, Tongji University, China
* Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium

Technical Program Committee (preliminary)
---------------------------------------

* Maha Abdallah, University of Paris VI, France
* Dewan T. Ahmed, University of Ottawa, Canada
* Jean Botev, University of Luxembourg
* Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
* Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
* Herman Engelbrecht, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
* Stefano Ferretti, Univ. Bologna, Italy
* Alexandru Iosup, TU Delft, Netherland
* Huaiyu (Kitty) Liu, Intel Labs, USA
* Jay Lorch, Microsoft Research, USA
* Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil
* Kjetil Raaen, NITH, Norway
* Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
* Richard Sueselbeck, Univ. Mannheim, Germany
* Cristina Videira Lopes, UC Irvine, USA
* Shinya Yamamoto, NIST, Japan
* Suiping Zhou, Teesside University, UK
* Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore, Singapore