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CALL FOR PAPERS

The 6th International Workshop on
Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2014)

at the ACM Multimedia Systems conference (MMSYS 2014)

March 19-21, 2014

Singapore, Singapore

http://ml.sun.ac.za/mmve2014/

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

Submission Guidelines
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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. Accepted papers and demos must be presented at the workshop and will be indexed in ACM, included as part of ACM MMSys 2014 proceedings.

Please submit at: http://ml.sun.ac.za/mmve2014/submissions, and e-mail mmve@ml.sun.ac.za for any inquiries.

Important Dates
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Submission Deadline: October, 31st, 2013, 23:59 GMT+2
Acceptance Notification: December, 15th, 2014
Camera Ready Version: February, 15th, 2014
Workshop Date: March, 20th, 2014

Organizers
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• Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
• Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Gregor Schiele, DERI, National University of Ireland, Ireland
• Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Arno Wacker, University of Kassel, Germany
• Carsten Griwodz, University of Oslo, Norway
• Herman Engelbrecht, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa (General Chair)

Technical Program Committee (preliminary)
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• John Gilmore, Vastech, South Africa
• Gregor Schiele, DERI, National University of Ireland, Ireland
• Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
• Gwendal Simom, Telecom Bretagne, France
• Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium
• Maha Abdallah, University of Paris VI, France
• Jean Botev, University of Luxumbourg
• Stefano Ferretti, Univ. Bologna, Italy
• Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy
• Emanuele Carlini, Institute of Science and Technology, Italy
• Matteo Varvello, Alcatel-Lucent, USA
• Bhojan Anand, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Cristina Videira Lopes, UC Irvine, USA
• Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
• Carsten Griwodz, University of Oslo, Norway
• Herman Engelbrecht, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa