| We are delighted to welcome you to Divani Palace Acropolis hotel and to the 1st International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies. We hope that you have a wonderful stay in Athens and that your visit will be enjoyable and rewarding. SAMT 2006 targets to narrow the large disparity between the low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media - The Semantic Gap. SAMT started out as two workshops, EWIMT 2004 and EWIMT 2005, that quickly achieved success in attracting high-quality papers from across Europe and beyond. This year EWIMT turned into the full-fledged conference SAMT, bringing together forums, projects, institutions and individuals investigating the integration of knowledge, semantics and low-level multimedia processing, and linking them with industrial engineers who exploit the underlying emerging technology. There were 68 papers in total submitted to the SAMT 2006 conference and each was reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. We are grateful to the members of the technical program committee who completed these reviews and allowed us to put together a very strong technical program of 17 papers. The selection process was very competitive with only 25% of papers being selected for oral presentation. The program also includes two invited keynote talks from Alan Smeaton and Guus Schreiber and we are very grateful to them for their insightful presentations. The entire organizing committee have done an excellent job in putting together the schedule for this conference and coordinating a number of events including 4 workshops, 3 tutorials, 3 special sessions, poster, demo and projects sessions, the SAMT 2006 industry day, and two invited talks from Roberto Cencioni and Luis Rodriguez-Rosello featuring the launch of the 7th framework ICT program. Our steering committee has been of great assistance in all critical decisions, and the staff of the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens has provided invaluable help to making this conference happen. Special thanks should go to Marios Phinikettos and Themis Zervou for the tremendous amount of work they have put into supporting SAMT 2006. The SAMT 2006 conference is being held in cooperation with the European Commission, EURASIP, COST 292 and the IET, and we are grateful to these organizations for promoting the event. We are also indebted to K-Space network of excellence, of which SAMT has been envisioned as the flagship event, and all sponsors for their contributions and financial support.
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