Back home after a week of multimedia. In my opinion, the prevalent themes of ACM Multimedia 2008 and the associated conference on multimedia information retrieval (MIR) seemed to be social multimedia retrieval (with a lot of Flickr and geo-tag related work) and affective multimedia retrieval (with a lot of music/video analysis using valence/arousal curves). Overall, the quality of the conference was quite high, certainly a worthwhile visit. I enjoyed especially the interaction with friends, the demo sessions, and the keynotes at MIR by Tom Huang, Ramesh Jain, and Shih-Fu Chang. Not surprisingly, they all seemed to agree that the semantic gap is still the major scientific problem to solve. Interestingly, however, they all three believe the solution might come from users interacting with multimedia on the Internet. I fully subscribe to their conclusion.