SemanticMetadata.net

CfP 3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics – Deadline Extension!

Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina
San Diego, California, USA
December 14-16, 2009
https://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/ms09/

The 3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics will be a one- day workshop to be held during the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM’09, http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/). It will take place in Dec. 2009 in San Diego, USA.

Objectives

Information is increasingly becoming ubiquitous and all-pervasive, with the World-Wide Web as its primary repository. The rapid growth of information on the Web creates new challenges for information retrieval. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the investigation and development of the next generation web – the Semantic Web.

Multimedia information has always been part of the Semantic Web paradigm, but, in general, has been discussed very simplistically by the Semantic Web community. We believe that, rather than trying to discover a media object’s hidden meaning, one should formulate ways of managing media objects so as to help people make more intelligent use of them. The relationship between users and media objects should be studied. Media objects should be interpreted relative to the particular goal or point-of-view of a particular user at a particular time.

Content-based descriptors are necessary to this process. At the same time, such descriptions are definitely not sufficient. Context is also important, and should be managed. The area of emergent multimedia semantics has been initiated to study the measured interactions between users and media objects, with the ultimate goal of trying to satisfy the user community by providing them with the media objects they require, based on their individual previous media interactions.

The arrival of Web 2.0 has added new paradigms to the media mix. Such concepts as folksonomies, a form of emergent semantics, introduce a collaborative, dynamic approach to the generation of ontologies and media object semantics. That such an approach results in a stable semantics, though surprising, has been recently demonstrated.

As one can see, the field of multimedia semantics is in great flux at the present time. Approaches which seek to unify these disparate disciplines are especially necessary.

This will be a one-day workshop to be held during ISM’09. Besides the standard research contributions, there will also be a poster session and a session devoted to the presentation of results from current Ph.D. students, as well as a keynote talk. Based on last year’s workshop, the keynote will include discussions of necessary research agendas which will bring together important subsets of the research communities working on multimedia semantics, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Best papers of this workshop will be published in IEEE Multimedia.

List of Topics

We welcome all papers relevant to topics in multimedia semantics, including those at the confluence of multimedia information management, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0, such as,

• Computational semiotics
• Conceptual clustering
• Emergent semantics in the social web
• Event representation and detection
• Folksonomies in social media sharing
• Genre detection
• Industrial use-cases and applications
• Intelligent browsing and visualization
• Media ontology learning
• Media mining in the social web
• Modeling and recognition of visual objects and actions
• Multimedia management and consumption in communities
• Multimedia extraction and social annotation
• Multimedia ontologies for the social web
• Multisensory data integration and fusion for decision making
• Perception and cognition in the context of Web 2.0
• Semantic metadata for mobile applications
• Semantics enabled multimedia applications (including search, browsing, retrieval, visualization) for the social web
• Social networking
• Spectral methods
• Standards for the social web
• User interfaces

Important Dates

• EXTENDED: 11:59 PM EST, July 27, 2009 — Submissions due
• August 20, 2009 — Acceptance notification
• September 25, 2009 — Camera-ready papers due

Contact

For further information. informal requests or questions please contact the workshop organizers:

• Farshad Fotouhi, Wayne State University, fotouhi@wayne.edu
• William Grosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn, wgrosky@umich.edu
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, mlux@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
• Peter Stanchev, Kettering University, pstanche@kettering.edu

Caliph & Emir won the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2009!

Today in the morning I got the following mail announcing the winner of the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2009!

Dear Authors,

It is my pleasure to announce the overall winner of the 2009 ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition.  This year, the honor falls on “Caliph & Emir: MPEG-7 photo annotation and retrieval”, an open-source project led by Mathias Lux at Klagenfurt University, Austria (http://sourceforge.net/projects/caliph-emir/).

Congratulations to Mathias and his co-contributors for producing a high-quality open-source implementation of a large part of the MPEG-7 standard, with significant potential impact.

I would also like to thank all of you for participating in this year’s open-source software competition, and for contributing to the research and open-source communities. We had 17 high-quality submissions this year (originating from 12 countries), of which 5 projects were selected by the review committee for presentation, demonstration and publication.

Thank you again for making this a high-quality competition.

Regards,
Apostol (Paul) Natsev, Open Source Competition Chair

After being there last year with LIRe (find the paper here) I know that the open source software competition is a very high level and challenging track. I feel totally honored and I really appreciate this!

Contribution @ I-KNOW 09 accepted!

The contribution of Christoph Kofler and me with the title “An exploratory study on the explicitness of user intentions in digital photo retrieval” has been accepted for publication and presentation at the I-Know ‘09. Here is the abstract (the full paper will follow as soon as we have prepared the camera ready version):

Search queries are typically interpreted as specification of information need of a user. Typically the search query is either interpreted as is or based on the context of a user, being for instance a user profile, his/her previously undertaken searches or any other background information. The actual intent of the user – the goal s/he wants to achieve with information retrieval – is an important part of a user’s context. In this paper we present the results of an exploratory study on the interplay between the goals of users and their search behavior in multimedia retrieval.

This work has been supported by the SOMA project.

Links

• I-KNOW 09
• SOMA project

WMM’09 – Multimedia Metadata Community Workshop

Now in the 2nd day of the workshop one can call this event definitely a successful one! currently the PhD session is advancing with very intersting projects and – hopefully – constructive critics. Yesterday many interesting projects have triggered lively research discussion. Today I’m looking forward  to visiting Airbus

Links

• Online proceedings

Student Big Days first time at Klagenfurt University

On April 1st Microsoft organizes its roadshow “Student Big Days” in Klagenfurt. From 16.00 to 19.30 there are three sessions and afterwards there is a lot of time to talk to the speakers at a buffet. Horst Kandutsch assured that there will be numerous goodies for participants

You can find more information here (sorry, German only). Please register to give the organizers a chance to get enough food and drinks

Links

• Student Big Days

Report from the Open Source Track @ ACM MM

Within the open source track of the ACM Multimedia conference the SIGMM  (Special Interest Group on Multimedia of the ACM) wants to provide a platform on discussing tools and code free to use in research as well as industry project. As I already blogged I had a presentation on Lire there. However all other contributors were nearly as interesting, if not even more

Marco Lohse presented a Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM), which was developed at Saarland University and is now available with dual licensing. He is also CEO of the company selling the non GPL license. The software is impressive and his demo was great. No surprise he won the prize of 700 $. (http://www.motama.com/nmm.html)

Yannick Alluse presented GpuCV, an extension of OpenCV towards CUDA and shader based computing. Important thing is that the library decides whether CPU, Shader or the GPU will be used for processing. (https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Gpucv/Web/)

Andreas Berger showed a framework for DVB-* transmission. It allows for inexpensive setup of for instance a DVB-T or DVB-H broadcasting service in labs or research projects. As its very generic one can compose the DVB stream fully free, so MHP, IP Data, EPG and so on are possible. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fatcaps/)

Jose San Pedro Wandelmer from the University of Sheffield presented his project FOBS, which is actually a wrapper for ffmpeg for C++ and JMF. I already knew FOBS as I have used it several times, but meeting Jose and talking to him was great. (http://fobs.sourceforge.net/)

ACM Multimedia 2010 in Florence, IT

Although my boss Laszlo Böszörmenyi did a great job on presenting our bid for hosting ACM Multimedia 2010, we didn’t stand a chance against Florenze. Alberto del Bimbo and his group will host the ACM Multimedia in 2010. Although we are slightly sad because we thought we will get it for sure (we didn’t know our competitors), we are now quite relieved that (i) another one is doing the organizational work and (ii) we had a good opportunity to present our department & research groups within the ACM MM community. We’ll definitely be there in Florence and help the group of Alberto del Bimbo as good as we can.

First impressions of the ACM Multimedia 2008

Yesterday the ACM Multimedia 2008 started here in Vancouver. In contrast to last years conference it takes place in a luxury hotel, whereas many researchers have booked one of the surrounding less expensive hotels The conference started with a rather disappointing keynote. It did not meet my expectations in novelty and importance of topic. The best paper session however was better, especially the 4th presentation on the Flickr distance by a Microsoft guy

The program of the first two days was somewhat crowded. Short papers, represented by posters, where presented in a small romm in parallell to 3 parallel main sessions. So one has a tight schedule around here.

At the ACM business meeting we (the ITEC @ Klagenfurt University) placed our bid for hosting the conference in 2010. Although our presentation was great we have strong competitors from Firenze. Decision is made in the next few days, perhaps even this evening.

This was the first of three things I’m here for in Vancouver. Tomorrow, on the last day of the main conference I’m going to present LIRe in the open source track and on Friday I’m going to present the joint research work of Oge Marques and me. Stay tuned I’ll post the slides

Report from Triple-I (part II)

The rest of the Triple-I was straight forward for me. I did a lot of talking with old colleages and industry people interested in multimedia asset management. Looks like everybody collected a huge amount of digital photos and is now searching for means to organize them

Next years Triple-I will be somewhat different. Having found a call for a next year’s I-Know I think the Triple-I will go back to the original I-Know as it seems that especially the concept of the I-semantics didn’t work out. The next event of the Multimedia Metadata Community will be our 9th workshop  in Toulouse.

Report from the Triple-I

The first day here at the Triple-I was very successful: The KASW ‘08 workshop went great, presentations were insightful and discussions were lively. My presentation was also great although I could have talked longer (the talk scheduled after mine did not take place due to visa issues). Highlights were definitely the overview of research on folksonomies of Andreas Hotho, Ralf Klamma’s summary of the finding of his group regarding online communites (see Flickr for a quote) and the position of Andrew Gordon regarding the blogosphere and common sense knowledge.

Today I already chaired the special session of the multimedia metadata community at the I-Media with three interesting presentations. Besides all the scientific stuff I had a lot of chats about industry needs, computer games on an academic level, my eee pc and my trip to the GC