Professor Huamin Qu and PhD Student Kento Shigyo Received Honourable Mention Award at ACM Multimedia 2024

We would like to congratulate Professor Qu and Kento Shigyo for receiving the Honourable Mention Award at ACM Multimedia 2024! Psychotherapy addresses mental health issues through exercises that help manage negative thoughts. While mental imagery exercises can be effective, challenges like finding a suitable environment and maintaining vividness may limit their impact.

To overcome these issues, they developed a VR-mediated therapeutic exercise based on cognitive defusion principles from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). This method allows users to visualize negative thoughts as virtual objects (e.g., a dark spiky sphere) that they can modify and place in a virtual living room, promoting new perspectives. An experiment with 20 non-clinical postgraduate students assessed the VR exercise alongside traditional mental imagery techniques. Results showed significant improvements in mental states for both methods, with the VR approach demonstrating slightly better efficacy. This suggests that VR-based exercises could enhance engagement and focus in psychotherapy, although further research is needed to explore their specific benefits and limitations.

ACM Multimedia (ACMMM) is a premier international conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) focusing on multimedia research, technologies, and applications. In ACMMM 2024, 4385 submissions entered the review stage, among which 1149 papers (26.2%) were accepted, and 174 papers (3.9%) were selected for oral presentation. ACMMM 2024 recognized outstanding contributions by presenting one Best Paper Award and seven Honorable Mention Awards, selected through a vote by the conference committee.

Once again, we want to congratulate Professor Qu and Kento for such an accomplishment. We are looking forward to their future achievements and wishing them the best of luck for their upcoming endeavors.

Link to the paper published at ACM digital library: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664647.3681504

Mr. Kento Shigyo (second from the left) for receiving the Honourable Mention Award at ACM Multimedia 2024.

Mr. Kento Shigyo was honored with the Honourable Mention Award at ACM Multimedia 2024.