The Research Ireland ADAPT Centre has secured and will chair three major international conferences in October 2025 in Dublin, placing Ireland firmly at the heart of the global multimedia and AI research community. Together these events are expected to inject approximately €4.5 million into the Irish economy, and bring together cutting-edge research, industry engagement, and emerging talent.
The conferences will take place during October and include:
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. The estimated overall economic benefit to Ireland will amount to approximately €4.5 million, reflecting delegate spend on travel, hotels, hospitality and associated ancillary services.
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.
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.
These conferences highlight Ireland’s emergence as a world-class hub for multimedia and AI research. They 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.
The presence of three major conferences in one city over consecutive days creates a critical mass of high-level activity, raising Ireland’s profile in the global research ecosystem.
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.
Speaking about ADAPT’s success in securing these events and the significance of them, Professor Cathal Gurrin, Deputy Director of ADAPT and Deputy Head of the School of Computing at DCU, said: “Hosting three consecutive world-class conferences in Dublin is a landmark achievement for Ireland’s multimedia and AI research community. It reflects not only the calibre and ambition of our researchers but also Ireland’s growing influence on the global scientific stage. By welcoming the international research community to our shores, we have a unique opportunity to showcase Ireland’s innovation, creativity and excellence in science and to strengthen our position as a global leader shaping the future of multimedia and artificial intelligence.”
