,

EMS 2026 – The 4th Workshop on Emerging Multimedia Systems

EMS 2023  |  EMS 2024  | EMS 2025

📢 Call For Submissions 

Multimedia has played a significant role in driving Internet usage and has led to a range of technological advancements, such as content delivery networks, compression algorithms, and streaming protocols. With emerging applications, including (but not limited to) augmented,  virtual, and extended reality (XR), real-time telepresence, AI-generated content, video analytics, and the usage of AI in multimedia systems in general, multimedia is undergoing a fundamental shift in sharing experiences online and continues to drive the future of the Internet. As these next-generation ultra-low-latency, interactive, and immersive technologies evolve, it is crucial to revisit developed techniques for new formats and representations, not only to enhance performance and interactivity but also to improve energy efficiency and maintain high Quality of Experience (QoE). This workshop will bring together experts from diverse fields, including video streaming research, source video coding, analytics, rate adaptation algorithms, networked systems, immersive media such as 3D and volumetric video streaming, AR/VR applications, as well as energy-efficient systems and QoE optimization, to exchange ideas on identifying challenges and opportunities in designing advanced networked systems for these emerging multimedia technologies. This workshop is a successor of the Emerging Multimedia System (EMS) workshop from ACM SIGCOMM.

🎯 Topics of interest in Call-for-Papers 

This workshop calls for research on various issues and solutions that can enable live video analytics with the role of edge computing. Topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:

  • Networked systems for immersive content capture, streaming, and display
  • Networked systems for AI-driven video applications
  • Networked systems for multimedia generative AI
  • Machine learning for emerging multimedia distribution
  • Emerging multimedia systems for novel content formats (point clouds, light fields, holography, NeRF, 3DGS, etc.)
  • Volumetric video delivery on the Internet
  • Ultra-low-latency networking for multimedia applications
  • High-throughput transport and distribution for emerging media
  • Adaptive streaming under network/user constraints for immersive media
  • Novel content distribution network for AR/VR applications
  • Management of AR/VR networked systems
  • Wireless and mobile immersive systems
  • AR/VR applications in current (5G) and future (6G) wireless networks
  • Compression and transmission design for 3D content
  • Edge cloud systems for immersive experiences
  • Quality of Experience in emerging multimedia systems
  • Energy efficiency in emerging multimedia systems

Besides typical full research papers that present a complete idea with proper evaluation, we also welcome work-in-progress papers.

  • Full research papers present new research that has not been previously published. Authors should submit their work describing early/emerging results in a relevant topic area. Full papers are limited to 6 pages, including figures, tables, appendices, and references.
  • Lightning papers can provide a summary of early, emerging, or ongoing work, as well as short updates of previously published work. Lightning papers will be presented and published in the proceedings. They should not exceed 2 pages, with a maximum of one additional page for references only.

📅 Important Dates

  • Paper Submissions:  July 14, 2026
  • Acceptance Notification:  August 26, 2026
  • Camera-ready: September 21, 2026

 Organizing Committee

👥 Co-Chairs

🎓 Technical Program Committee 

  • TBD

🎤 Keynote Speech

  • TBD
,

Workshop on Media Energy Consumption Measurement and Exposure

Sustainability in Video Encoding and Streaming:
Energy-Efficient Techniques and Metrics

Workshop on Media Energy Consumption Measurement and Exposure

[Workshop URL] [Slides] [PDF]

Presenter: Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Abstract: The presentation discusses the increasing environmental impact of video streaming and highlights the urgent need for more sustainable approaches across the entire streaming pipeline. Video traffic dominates internet usage and contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions, while the demand for higher quality content continues to drive up computational complexity and energy consumption in encoding, delivery, and playback.

A central insight is that there is a strong trade-off between video quality and energy consumption, where small reductions in quality can lead to substantial energy savings. By introducing energy as an explicit optimization objective, techniques such as content-aware encoding, energy-aware bitrate ladder construction, and real-time optimization for live streaming can significantly reduce energy usage while maintaining nearly the same perceptual quality.

The work also emphasizes the role of adaptive bitrate algorithms that incorporate energy consumption alongside traditional quality and buffer-based metrics. These approaches demonstrate that it is possible to simultaneously improve user experience and reduce energy consumption, indicating that sustainability and performance can be aligned rather than conflicting goals.

To enable such optimizations, the presentation introduces a range of metrics and models, including video complexity measures, quality prediction models, and machine learning-based approaches for estimating encoding and decoding energy as well as CO₂ emissions. These tools support more informed, data-driven decisions across the full streaming workflow from encoding to playback.

Another important theme is end-to-end optimization, where energy efficiency depends on the combined behavior of encoding strategies, bitrate selection, and client-side adaptation. Industry efforts confirm the practical relevance of these approaches and highlight the importance of collaboration and real-world validation.

Despite promising results, several challenges remain, including difficulties in measuring and benchmarking energy consumption, the lack of standardized methodologies, and the limited integration of energy considerations into existing workflows. Overall, the presentation argues that energy consumption should become a first-class optimization target in video streaming systems, similar to established quality metrics, to enable truly sustainable media delivery.

Keywords: sustainable streaming, energy-aware encoding, adaptive bitrate streaming, green multimedia, video compression, bitrate ladder optimization, QoE optimization, energy-quality tradeoff, video complexity analysis, CO2 footprint, energy modeling, machine learning for video, end-to-end optimization, eco-efficient streaming, real-time streaming optimization

ScaleSys Workshop @ IoT 2025

1st Edition of the ScaleSys Workshop, International Workshop on Intelligent and Scalable Systems across the Computing Continuum @ The 15th International Conference on the Internet of Things

⭐ Keynotes:
Atakan Aral (University of Veinna), Scaling Brain-Inspired Edge Computing
Lauri Lovén (University of Oulu), Agentic Edge Intelligence: Past, Present and Future