Book excerpt: The 2010 Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2010) was held in Shanghai at Fudan University, during September 21–24, 2010. Since its inauguration in 2000, PCM has been held in various places around the Pacific Rim, namely Sydney (PCM 2000), Beijing (PCM 2001), Hsinchu (PCM 2002), Singapore (PCM 2003), Tokyo (PCM 2004), Jeju (PCM 2005), Zhejiang (PCM 2006), Hong Kong (PCM 2007), Tainan (PCM 2008), and Bangkok (PCM 2009). PCM is a major annual international conference organized as a forum for the dissemination of state-of-the-art technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied multimedia analysis and processing. PCM 2010 featured a comprehensive technical program which included 75 oral and 56 poster presentations selected from 261 submissions from Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Norway, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the UK, and the USA. Three distinguished researchers, Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou from Nanjing University, Dr. Yong Rui from Microsoft, and Dr. Tie-Yan Liu from Microsoft Research Asia delivered three keynote talks to the conference. We are very grateful to the many people who helped to make this conference a s- cess. We would like to especially thank Hong Lu for local organization, Qi Zhang for handling the publication of the proceedings, and Cheng Jin for looking after the c- ference website and publicity. We thank Fei Wu for organizing the special session on large-scale multimedia search in the social network settings.