Background Multimedia Research Multimedia is now a mature field, having evolved over approximately 20 years. The term “media” traditionally referred to entities such as audio, video, text, images, graphics, animation. New media will be added in the future, including virtual reality, holography, haptics, eSmell, eTaste, eThought,…. The term “multimedia” has now been accepted to mean documents composed of at least two correlated media. The correlation could be temporal, spatial or semantic. Applications now appear in many fields such as entertainment, publishing, advertising, banking, insurance, e-commerce, travel, medical, defense, training, geographical information systems, weather and many others. This journal was created as a result of a unanimous decision at an ACM SIG Multimedia Strategic Retreat in Berkeley, California, held on Oct. 31 and Nov.1, 2003 and attended by 25 invited members of the academic and industrial ACM SIG Multimedia community. Topics The journal covers three general subfields of multimedia computing, communications, and applications, each consisting of various areas of research. Some examples are given below. Please see the Authors Guide for a list of specific topics.