The increasing momentum towards cognitive computing unlocks a diverse set of opportunities and challenges for multimedia research. IBM Watson™, Google Chauffeur and Baby X are just some examples of systems including multimedia-related technologies that hold a lot of potential to impact business and society. An important aspect of cognitive computing is that it also offers a number of possibilities to augment human capacity and understanding in decision-making processes.

Decision-making can be seen as a cognitive process of making choices by setting goals, identifying and gathering information (evidence), reflecting and choosing alternatives to take actions. In this context, the role of multimedia research goes far beyond an isolated analysis of multimedia content to improve, for instance, indexing and retrieval. In fact, multimedia plays a key role in the signification process (i.e. semantic qualification) of unstructured data demanded for making decisions. To decision makers, effectively producing and consuming semantically structured and relevant multimodal information is key. Producing structured data, building knowledge from it, and making decisions based on this knowledge is challenging and involves sophisticated multimedia and cognitive processes. To address this challenge it is necessary to explore multimedia through different perspectives such as Visualization, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, speech recognition, social media, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Human-Centered Computing, and the Synchronization in space and time of multimodal input interfaces, multiple distributed exhibition devices, sensors and actuators.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with ISM 2016 in San Jose, CA, USA on December 11-13, 2016. The page limit for workshop publications is 6 pages (see the manuscript preparation instructions). MuSDeMP papers will be presented at IEEE ISM2016, and included in the symposium Proceedings.