SemanticMetadata.net

I have to confess: I like the Vuvuzela!

While many people keep complaining about the Vuvuzela, I’m definitely a big fan of those. I think it’s so much better than the air horn (which I usually dislike). For everyone who did not make it to buy one I’ve sampled 5 mp3s of mine. Have fun!

• Vuvuzela-01.mp3, ~ 42K, 5 sec
• Vuvuzela-02.mp3, ~ 6.9K, < 1 sec
• Vuvuzela-03.mp3, ~ 11K, 1 sec
• Vuvuzela-04.mp3, ~ 49K, 8 sec
• Vuvuzela-05.mp3, ~ 4.9K, < 1 sec

Btw. I publish them under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license

Research Ass. & POO Man.

CfP Workshop on Interactive Multimedia Applications (WIMA)

URL: http://tinyurl.com/wima2010

Multimedia applications have become ubiquitous lately. People record and watch videos on mobile and stationary devices, they use non linear video editors, and they share and organize their personal multimedia archives. Lots of research has been  done on the technical aspects  of multimedia, like streaming, presentation, transcoding, adaptation and content  based retrieval  and  analysis.  But  handling  multimedia  is  an interactive process and  users have  to be  taken into  account. Even consumption is often accompanied  with communication,  non linear  browsing and search. This interactivity in multimedia applications is a challenging yet  very promising topic  as especially  in multimedia  applications people  more often accept innovative ideas and fundamental changes more easily.

This workshop should bring  together researchers and practitioners  from the fields of Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction research  (HCI). In this workshop we aim  to discuss recent scientific advances  and also first results of greenhouse work in the field of interactive  multimedia applications.  We also  encourage the  submission of  papers presenting studies  on  interactivity  in  multimedia  systems  or  discussing  the development of applications in this field.

Topics of interest
Topics include the aspects of interactivity in the following fields:

• Multimedia Retrieval, Browsing & Navigation
• User Intentions in Multimedia Search, Annotation & Production
• Multimedia Production and Post-Production
• Multimedia in Specialized Domains (e.g. Medical Scenarios, Sports, Security, etc.)
• Image, Audio and Video Analysis
• Mobile Multimedia Applications
• Multimedia on the Web
• Social Multimedia
• Multimedia Management and Databases
• Distributed Multimedia Systems

We also encourage the submission of greenhouse work and preliminary results to be discussed in the workshop.

Submission
Authors are invited to submit papers in the following categories:

• Full papers (14-20 pages)
• Short papers (6-14 pages)
• Posters (4 pages)

All papers have  to be formatted  according to the  Springer LNCS Style. Submission is handled by easychair, see http://tinyurl.com/wima2010 for details.

Important Dates

• EXTENDED to July 11, 2010 Deadline for Paper Submission
• July 30, 2010 Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
• August 22, 2010 Camera-Ready Deadline
• Nov 4 & 5, 2010 USAB 2010: HCI in Work & Learning, Life & Leisure

Program Committee

• Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Dalibor Mitrovic, TU Wien, AT
• Frank Hopfgartner, International Computer Science Institute, USA
• Harald Kosch, University of Passau, DE
• Mario Döller, University of Passau, DE
• Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, AT
• Martha Larson, TU Delft, NL
• Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University, US
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, DE
• Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia, P.R. China
• Vincent Charvillait, ENSEEIHT Toulouse, FR
• Werner Bailer, Joanneum Research, AT
• Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen, DE
• Yu Cao, California State University of Fresno, US

Workshop Chairs

• Klaus Schöffmann, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Laszlo Böszörmenyi, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, AT

For further questions please contact the program chairs at wima2010 <at> itec.uni-klu.ac.at

LIRe, Caliph & Emir, Citations & GPL

Although I hate this posts … out of necessity I have to say it: LIRe and Caliph & Emir are open source software licensed under GPL. This is good on the one hand as it is free and will stay so, but it is bad in a way that the integration of sources and binaries of LIRe and Caliph & Emir are bound to certain restrictions. Note that it was not my decision to put the whole thing under GPL, it was necessary to get all involved parties to “freeing” the software.

The restrictions are – boldly stated: if you use Caliph, Emir, Lire or any source out of these projects, then your project has to be GPL too … and of course therefore open source.

A second issue is citations: While the software and its source is free to use it’d be great to be cited in research papers and articles that use my software. Such citations are highly appreciated as I’m a researcher and citations is one of many criteria to measure the contributions of an individual to  research.

So we kindly ask you to refer the following paper in any publication mentioning Lire:

Lux Mathias, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis. Lire: Lucene Image Retrieval – An Extensible Java CBIR Library. In proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 1085-1088, Vancouver, Canada, 2008

• Download paper
• Download BibTeX

And we kindly ask you to refer the following paper in any publication mentioning Caliph & Emir:

Mathias Lux. Caliph & Emir: MPEG-7 photo annotation and retrieval. Proceedings of the seventeen ACM international conference on Multimedia, pp. 925-926, 2009, Beijing, China.

• Download Paper
• Download BibTeX

1st ITEC Soccer World Cup

While the bold and sporty soccer players run for the ball, we do electronic sports ITEC proudly presents the 1st ITEC Soccer World Cup 2010. 16 teams will battle for the Cup, just before the actual FIFA World Cup 2010. To enter the Cup just sign up your team (2-3 players) on the Google spreadsheet. Rules and constraints are given here.

Links

• Official ITEC Soccer World Cup web page
• Registration

CfP: Advanced Video Streaming Techniques for P2P Networks and Social Networking

Workshop held within ACM Multimedia, 25-29 October 2010, Firenze, Italy

More information available at http://www.p2pstreaming.eu

Paper submission deadline: June 10, 2010

Abstract. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a promising technology for video streaming, and offers advantages in terms of robustness, re-configurability and scalability. In this context, social networks and social services are emerging as a potential new driver for content delivery networks. Specifically, social networks potentially provide a new level of understanding and knowledge related to the interaction between people within a virtual space. Many emerging multimedia based services and applications have started to exploit the ‘social graph’ in new ways for establishing a basis for social recommendations, filtering etc.). As yet, one unexplored area of research relates to the exploiting the social graph for informing adaptive behaviour in P2P-based multimedia systems. On the other hand, the P2P video technology is still challenging, due to the need of reducing start-time and churn-induced instability, to the asymmetry of residential broadband connections, and to high packet loss rates due to router congestion and transmission errors on the physical network, node departure from the P2P overlay, strict timing out due to real time visualization. The lack of guarantee about the actual delivery of the data may cause drops in the reproduction quality and service outages. The workshop objective is to solicit novel contributions on all aspects of P2P-based video coding, streaming, and content distribution which is informed by social networks.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative P2P-based video streaming solutions
• P2P-based social media content distribution networks
• Advanced video coding techniques for real-time P2P applications:  layered/scalable video coding, multiple description coding, distributed  source coding
• Identification and design of proper metrics for performance evaluation and  monitoring including Quality of Service/Experience
• Content and context analysis and modelling for P2P-based social media  distribution
• Filtering and recommendation systems
• Error-resilience tools for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• Rate control and bandwidth adaptation for both single streams and multiple  stream multiplexing
• Cross layer optimization issues
• Protocols for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• P2P streaming prototype implementation for both live and on-demand streaming
• Advertisement, payment, and cashing systems
• Applications, standards, and practical deployments

SOMA World Games event – you’re invited!

In the course of the SOMA project we invite *you* on April 22nd, 2010 to the „SOMA World Games“ event. On four different stages four different games will be played:

• Rockband,
• Singstar,
• Wii Sports Ressort &
• Tony Hawk Ride.

Be there and join our games!

Why? We want to investigate how multimedia content is created in such a social event, and how this content can be used for our self-organizational approach of detecting and presenting “situations of interest” (as, e.g., “crowd formation”).

This means that you will become photographed and filmed. But do not worry, the gathered content is just used for our research purposes and will not be published elsewhere.

When? Thursday, April 22nd, 2010, from 17.00 to 23.00

Where? Lakeside Labs GmbH, Lakeside B04b, 1st floor, 9020 Klagenfurt

Please register for this social event in our doodle poll under http://www.doodle.com/vnw6sy5t7zgkae2i if you like to participate. There will be also plenty to eat and drink. We are looking forward to seeing you!

The SOMA Team

A refreshing selection of gender classes

While preparing my trip to the CHI 2010 in Atlanta I realized that I should get some classic game to play in my free time on my eee pc. I came to a site called GOG.com featuring “good old games”. And see there was a spring sale including Gothic 2. While this is great in general the registration process contained an even better feature: a whole new selection of genders to choose from. Of course I chose to be the dude

Btw. I’ll be in Atlanta next week. So if you’re there drop me a line and we investigate the possibility of beer.

DEXA-Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval (TIR’10)

Workshop on Impact of Scalable Video Coding on Multimedia Provisioning (SVCVision)

Workshop on Impact of Scalable Video Coding on Multimedia Provisioning (SVCVision)
Collocated with MobiMedia – 6th International Mobile Multimedia Communications Conference
6th-8th September 2010 – Lisbon, Portugal

http://www.mobimedia.org/ws_SVCVision.html

Aims and Scope

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) refers to the possibility of removing certain parts of a video bit stream in order to adapt it to a changing usage environment, e.g., end device capabilities, network condition or user preferences. SVC has been an active standardization and research area for at least 20 years, reaching back to H.262/MPEG-2, which offered scalable profiles. However, these previous attempts suffered from a significant loss in coding efficiency as well as a large increase in decoder complexity (and thus energy consumption), which hindered market adoption. Only the most recent attempt, i.e., the SVC extension of H.264/AVC, focuses on avoiding these disadvantages. Since H.264/SVC standardization started in 2003, it has been at the focus of many multimedia research groups.

Today’s increasing variety of end devices (smart phones, tablet PCs, Netbooks, Laptops, PCs, networked HDTVs, …) and the associated multitude of Internet connectivity options (GPRS/EDGE, UMTS, ADSL, PLC, WiMAX, …) provide particular momentum for SVC, which can be easily and pervasively adapted to these various usage environments. SVC also allows end devices to only decode a sub-set of the SVC bit stream, thus enabling in particular mobile end devices to minimize the necessary (processing) power requirements.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for both academic and industrial participants to exchange and discuss recent advancements and future perspectives of SVC.

Topics

SVC topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Robust streaming, error resilience and error concealment
- Streaming in heterogeneous environments
- Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video distribution
- Internet Protocol television (IPTV)
- Energy-efficient video distribution
- Content adaptation (e.g., scaling, rewriting, transcoding) and summarization
- Complexity optimization and new tools for achieving scalability
- Adaptation decision taking & context information
- Storage & file format
- Conditional access & protection
- Novel applications & implementation experiences

Important Dates

Paper Submission: 23. April 2010
Notification: 28. May 2010
Camera Ready: 25. June 2010

All accepted papers will be published in Springer Lecture Notes of ICST (LNICST) series and included in major article indexing services.