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

Personally I’d recommend the following if you want to take a look at the highlights of the workshop:

• Author Identification Using Imbalanced and Limited Training Texts – E. Stamatatos presents a new distance function for author identification. He gave a very good overview on this topic in his talk.
• An MDA Approach to Implement Personal IR Tools – Meyer zu Eissen and B. Stein show their architecture for modular search engines, which aims to formalize and simplify the construction of search engines and retrieval applications through the use of UML.

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.

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:

• I remember when we had to go to a gas station and *buy* porn. Now you have computers out there finding porn for you. You kids today have it too easy!
• If this doesn’t revolutionize the searching of online porn galleries, I don’t know what will.

• … 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)