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Event: Conference on “Significant Advances in Computer Science” (SACS) 2007

The Graz University of Technology celebrates the fact that it teaches computer science since 30 years with a conference, the conference on “Significant Advances in Computer Science” (SACS) 2007 taking place in Nov. 2007. The actual idea sounds promising. I hope some VIPs and prominent computer science research people will find their way to the SACS 2007! As an alumni of the TU Graz and former employee of the Know-Center I’ll be there!

Java Multimedia: FOBS, the FFMPEG JMF Implementation

Have you ever used JMF? Well many people have tried and if they didn’t need it that hard they stop trying soon. One main problem is in my opinion that you have to install the whole thing on your system (libraries outside Java are needed) to get reasonable performance, but you won’t get a lot of codecs. So DivX, MP4, AVC and others are not supported out of the box.

Recently I found two JMF implementation based on FFMPEG, whereas one of them had a really impressive feature: It just worked and did it well. Basically you get a pure Java JMF, but every codec that is not supported by the pure Java JMF, is handled by an FFMPEG shared library. This works out fine for Windows and is also supported for Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac.

If you ever wanted to program some multimedia features in Java: Give Omnividea FOBS a try. Best of all: It’s open source! The screenshot above shows a screenshot while playing the Spiderman game trailer (DivX codec & container, HD).

CfP 4th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval

Like in previous years Benno Stein organizes the TIR, the Workshop for Text Information Retrieval. This year the workshop takes place in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2007) in Germany in September.

Call for Papers (see also here):

Intelligent technologies for information mining and retrieval have become an important and exciting field of research in our information-flooded society. Methods of text-based information retrieval receive special attention, which results from the fundamental role of written text, from the high availability of the Internet, and from the rising importance of the different forms of Web communities.
Continue reading CfP 4th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval…

Report: The Results of the MMC-Workshop in Aachen

Unfortunately the Multimedia Metadata Community Workshop is over, but I’m looking forward to the next one. This time a Best Paper Award was announced and it was given to the paper “A formal framework for multimedia adaptation revisited: a metadata perspective” of Cezar Plesca, Vincent Charvillat & Romulus Grigoras from IRIT-ENSEEIHT (France). The picture shows  while his presentation. The research as well as the paper are really good work and absolutely worth reading.

In the open community discussion, which was about social software and privacy, a lot of different approaches and opinions were discussed. As always Ralf Klamma surprised us with his “broader than the average view” and contributed general aspects and the history of the concept of privacy. Michael Granitzer from the Know-Center pointed out the possibility of cross site data mining, which could reveal more about users than they might imagine.

Report: Context & Digital Photo Collections (MMC-Workshop in Aachen)

Today the Workshop on “Multimedia Metadata – The Role of Semantics” started in Aachen, Germany. Currently the keynote presentation of Susanne Boll from Oldenburg University takes place. Susanne speaks about the necessity of taking the context of digital photos into account while analyzing photos and extracting metadata. She also gave examples: While indoor / outdoor classification is quite a challenging task, the combination of EXIF information (context dealing with flash, shutter speed, shooting mode, focal length, etc. ) with the content analysis yields quite good results.

The talk of Susanne shows the direction where multimedia research should (also) go. The integration of the user is necessary as it is the driving force of the quite successful Web 2.0 movement.