Interactive distributed multimedia systems

We are pleased to present the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Interactive Distributed Multimedia Systems (IDMS 2001), held from September 4-7, 2001, in Lancaster, UK, in cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM and SIGMM. This year, we received 48 research papers from academic and industrial institutions worldwide. Following a rigorous review process, 15 papers were accepted as full publications, while 8 were chosen as short positional papers to stimulate discussion. The technical program featured three invited papers: "QoS for Multimedia: What’s Going to Make It Pay?" by Derek McAuley, "Enabling the Internet to Provide Multimedia Services" by Markus H- mann, and "MPEG-21 Standard: Why an Open Multimedia Framework?" by Fernando Pereira. We extend our gratitude to those who contributed to the success of IDMS 2001, particularly the Program Committee for their thorough reviews under tight deadlines. We also acknowledge the support from Agilent, BTexact Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft Research, Orange, and Sony Electronics, which made the event memorable. We hope these proceedings will aid future research and that IDMS will remain a vibrant forum for discussions on distributed multimedia research for years to come.