Mining that involves finding representative knowledge in data is an essential step of intelligent data application. Traditionally, mining research has concerned itself with achieving completeness efficiently for homogeneous data. However, nowadays, easy data collection in a variety of research areas, including social networks, bioinformatics, mobile sensing, healthcare, security, etc., has led to a massive amount of diverse and heterogeneous data—the so-called multimedia data. As a result, there is an increasing demand for developing better methods for extracting knowledge from multimedia data and more practical intelligent applications based on the extracted knowledge.

There are several important aspects to mining knowledge from multimedia data. (1) multimedia data collection: how to collect meaningful and high-quality multimedia data effectively, without compromising personal privacy in different research domains; (2) multimedia mining: how to design appropriate algorithms for dealing with multimedia data sets that are beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process within a tolerable elapsed time; (3) multimedia mining pattern visualization: how to present mining results in a more intuitive way, and how to abstract key information to visualize the relationship between multimedia data; and (4) practical application: how multimedia mining algorithms apply to the real-world.

The 1st International Workshop on Mining and Application of Multimedia (MAM) will serve as a forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in multimedia mining and applications. This workshop encourages authors to develop multimedia applications and evaluate their methodologies using real multimedia data and investigate challenging problems in the real world. We plan to invite a keynote speaker who has pioneer contributions in several related areas, including mining in social networking, bioinformatics, healthcare, and mobile sensing, etc., to give a talk about the current trend and the future development of multimedia.