DCU academics co-ordinate Multimedia and AI conferences welcoming over 2,200 International Researchers

Last week, The CBMI 2025 (International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing) took place, followed by the MediaEval 2025 Workshop over the weekend.

These three events combined will gather approximately 2,200 delegates and will feature 8 keynote speakers, 30 associated workshops, and an intensive programme of tutorials, panels, poster sessions and demonstrations.

ACM Multimedia 2025 featured an outstanding lineup of internationally recognised speakers who shared their insights into the scientific, societal, and creative frontiers of multimedia research.

- Dr. Shalini De Mello, Director of Research for AI-Mediated Reality at NVIDIA, opens the conference with a keynote on “AI-Mediated Human Interaction: Blurring the Boundaries Between the Physical and Digital Worlds.” Her talk explores how multimodal perception and generative AI are reshaping human communication and creativity.

- Dr. Christoph Bregler, Senior Director and Distinguished Scientist at Google DeepMind, speaks on “Media Provenance and the Future of Authenticity,” addressing the challenges and solutions surrounding deepfakes, misinformation, and the preservation of digital trust.

In addition to the keynote sessions, the conference hosts industry and academic talks featuring leaders from Meta, Microsoft, Alibaba, Toyota, Baidu, ByteDance, Fujitsu, Lenovo, Nvidia, Google, Samsung, Tencent, Dolby Labs, Adobe, Huawei, and several major universities, offering perspectives on the responsible deployment of multimedia AI technologies and the importance of human-centered design.

Over five days, participants will engage in an extensive program of over 1,600 contributions featuring keynotes, paper sessions, thirty workshops, tutorials, panels, demos, and twenty-six Grand Challenges and the inaugural ACM MM Hackathon. The event also emphasises diversity, inclusion, and interdisciplinary collaboration, with strong participation from early-career researchers and students worldwide.

These conferences bring together academia and industry, foster collaboration, and help translate fundamental research into real-world impact across sectors including healthcare, entertainment, cultural heritage, virtual and augmented reality, and large-scale multimedia analytics.

Early-stage female researchers at ADAPT are leading the organisation of the CBMI 2025 and MediaEval 2025 conferences, supported by the research centre.  This highlights ADAPT’s commitment to diversity, excellence and nurturing the next generation of research leaders. 

Themes across the three events will span the breadth of cutting-edge multimedia and AI research.  CBMI 2025 will focus on content-based multimedia indexing in the era of artificial intelligence, exploring areas such as retrieval, browsing, management, visualisation, analytics, and multimodal or multimedia verification.  MediaEval 2025 will emphasise reproducible multimedia research and evaluation benchmarks, addressing real-world tasks that include visual question answering for gastrointestinal imaging, video memorability, generative AI news-thumbnail retrieval, and multimodal summarisation. Meanwhile, ACM MM 2025 will cover the full spectrum of multimedia innovation, from video, audio, and speech to sensors, virtual and augmented reality, haptics, and social data, with particular emphasis on generative multimedia, foundation models, multimodal fusion, and user-experience research.

Professor Cathal Gurrin, Deputy Director of ADAPT and Deputy Head of the School of Computing at DCU, said: