Tomorrow I’m an invited speaker at Graz University of Technology in the course on “Applications of Knowledge Management” of Markus Strohmaier. I’ll talk about Visual Information Retrieval featuring the Semantic Gap and a round-up of low level features and indexing strategies. Looking forward to this event as I really like these overview presentations 
Currently listening to the last talk of this day for me I’ll try to put my impressions together to a full image of the first two days of the ACM Multimedia 2007. The location is quite charming: Augsburg is nice and the university here has a lot of nice ‘landscape’ (~green nothingness) around 
The picture to the right shows W. Wahlster doing his keynote yesterday. While it was impressive how many parallel and interconnected research activities can do with such an amount of funding the content of the talk was more like selling an EU IP
Todays first keynote was rather cool: R. Fageth from CeWe talked about their company and gave lots of impressive figures how people submit photos for printing. They for instance receive 4 TB of digital photos via upload for printing each day, while the mean image maximum age of an order is ~80 days.
The overall impression on the conference is: Many good contributions and lots of demos & posters to see. Many - but not all - present novelties or interesting ideas. Also interestingis the mere number of posters/demos/papers dealing with social media. Seems to hit the research
Last Monday I’ve been at the Text Information Retrieval workshop, taking place in the Regensburg University in context of the DEXA conference. Benn Stein - as always - did a very good job on organizing the workshop. There were 11 papers accepted and the overall quality was high. All paper can be found online here.
Personally I’d recommend the following if you want to take a look at the highlights of the workshop:
Furthermore I also presented a paper there: Aspects of Broad Folksonomies, which I’ve done together in constant collaboration with Michael Granitzer and Roman Kern. The slides are also online here.
There is an article about some new image classification and labeling system online: The UC San Diego has developed (together with Google, they brought in the data) a machine learning approach for automatic image labeling. Find the article here.
Well this is not the first image analysis engine that was created and it won’t be the last, but the discussion at slashdot was particulary funny. Some excerpts go here:
… was similarly trained to recognize tanks in landscapes. [...] Then they introduced it to a new batch of images and it fell apart. Turns out that the initial set of images had all the tanks shot on a sunny day and all the tankless images shot on a cloudy day (or vice versa). It had learned to tell a sunny day from a cloudy day. Ha ha.
Now I can search for porn stars that look like that girl in my English class!
Thanks to social software we now know how the ordinary talkative geek thinks about image search
(thx to Roman for the hint on the article & the discussion)
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!
