The Summer School is bringing together leading researchers and practitioners, provides postgraduate students the opportunity to gain deeper insight into the challenges related to multimedia semantics and the increasingly emerging applications relying on multimedia understanding, and to familiarize themselves with the diverse disciplines involved. SSMS include lectures, discussions and interactions with guest lecturers recognised as experts in their fields, as well as demonstrations and panels.

The first edition of SSMS was held in Kallithea, Chalkidiki, Greece, during 4-8 September 2006, and was mainly organized by the Multimedia Knowledge Group of the Informatics and Telematics Institute and was technically and financially supported by the aceMedia and K-Space projects (see mkg.iti.gr/ssms2006/)

The second edition was held in Glasgow in 2007. It was organised by the Information Retrieval Group of the Department of Computing Science at Glasgow University and had financial and technical support from the aceMedia, K-Space, Salero and IP-RACINE projects.

The third edition has been organised by the European R&D project MESH in Chania, ,Crete, Greece, and included a special programme for profesionals in the field of journalism. Addtional scientific, technological suppert was given by the COST 292 action, PetaMedia - P2P Tagged Media and the K-Space Project.

The fourth edition has been organized by WeST in Koblenz, Germany.