ACM MM Workflow

Use this to run an ACM Multimedia submission as a scheduled campaign rather than a deadline scramble. The SIGMM calendar has a long gap between the April submission chain and the July decision, so the work clusters at the front and the back.

The ACM MM calendar (2026 anchors, AoE)

Phase	2026 date	What must be true	Skill
Scope + track choice	pre-March	Contribution is cross-modal; thematic area and track chosen	acmmm-topic-selection
Draft + evidence	March	First page leads with the multimedia claim; ablations planned	acmmm-writing-style, acmmm-experiments
Abstract	Mar 25	Abstract registered in OpenReview	acmmm-submission
Paper	Apr 1	6–8 sigconf pages, anonymous, final PDF	acmmm-submission
Supplement	Apr 8	Media/appendix package, anonymous, plays	acmmm-supplementary
Rebuttal	~Jun 4	Anonymous response, small confirmatory results	acmmm-author-response
Notification	~early Jul	Decision + tier	acmmm-review-process
Camera-ready	~Aug 6	De-anonymized ACM version, artifact released	acmmm-camera-ready
Conference	Nov 10–14	Registered; media-ready talk/poster	acmmm-camera-ready

Treat these dates as the 2026 snapshot; reopen the current site each cycle. Note the 2026 notification date was listed inconsistently (July 7 on the CFP vs. July 9 elsewhere).

Front-loaded work (before April)

The April chain is unforgiving because three deadlines land in eight days. Do the slow work early:

• Lock the thematic area and track — they set format and blinding, and switching late is expensive.
• Build the cross-modal evidence: matched baselines and the leave-one-modality-out ablation that proves the fusion matters.
• Plan any user study now; recruiting raters cannot be done in the final week.
• Draft so the first page already leads with the multimedia contribution.

The three-deadline sprint

T-14d: freeze claims; media assets rendering from scripts
T-7d:  body fits 6-8 sigconf pages; references on overflow pages only
Mar 25: abstract registered (do not miss the earliest deadline)
Apr 1:  paper PDF final, anonymous, metadata-clean
Apr 8:  supplement packaged, anonymous, media plays for a stranger

The long gap and the rebuttal

Between April and June, prepare the confirmatory experiments a reviewer is likely to ask for (the missing baseline, the extra ablation) so the June rebuttal is a matter of reporting results, not scrambling to run them.

Back end (July–November)

• On acceptance, de-anonymize, complete ACM rights/CCS, and release the public artifact.
• Register early and plan travel to Rio; visas and international logistics are the usual failure.
• Build a presentation that plays the media — the seam between modalities should be seen/heard, not just described.
• On rejection, use the reviews to re-target: MM Asia, ICMR, a workshop, or next year's MM.

Risk register

Risk	Where it bites	Mitigation
Missing the abstract deadline	Mar 25 forecloses the paper	Register the abstract days early
Wrong track blinding	Desk reject	Confirm the track call before formatting
Fusion not shown to matter	Reviews / rebuttal	Run the leave-one-modality-out ablation pre-submission
User study not recruited in time	Perceptual claim unbacked	Start recruiting before April
Broken anonymous media link	Lost evidence in review	Test the mirror from a clean machine
Rio travel/visa delay	Cannot present	Start visa paperwork at acceptance

Re-targeting after a rejection

An ACM MM rejection is not the end of the work. Match the reviews to the next move: a retrieval-leaning paper can go to ICMR; a systems-leaning one to MMSys; a regionally scoped or earlier-stage result to ACM Multimedia Asia or a workshop; a matured version to the ACM TOMM journal or next year's ACM MM. Fix the decisive critique — usually the cross-modal-significance one — before resubmitting anywhere.

Output format

[Current phase] <scope/draft/abstract/paper/supplement/rebuttal/decision/camera-ready/conference>
[On track?] yes / at-risk: <what slips>
[Next deadline] <date + deliverable>
[Active skill] <which skill to run now>
[Risks] <ordered>