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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

Packing my Bag for the Triple-I

Tomorrow morning I’m on the road to go to Graz, where the Triple-I (former I-Know) takes place Wednesday to Friday. I’ll be there to visit and present at the KASW workshop and to chair the session of the multimedia metadata community. I’m looking forward to meet my colleages there. I-Know is always productive and good fun.

Report from the Games Convention :: Day 1

Today in the morning I came back from Leipzig, where I visited the Games Convention (GC). I was there to find find potential industry partners and people interested in cooperation with the university. Unfortunately at the Games Convention (GC) you need to have an appointment to meet someone as most interesting people are fully booked. However at some places I was lucky. I talked to a very helpful product manager of RTL-Games, a very interested technical account manager of Emergent Game Technologies and a PR assistant of NCSOFT. Also the sales manager of Techland was open to a short talk. Most negative experience was Crytek, where on the one hand someone had time to talk to me, but on the other expressed that they were only interested if I either came from a really big college with a lot of students or I had a lot of money to give them. Perhaps I just spoke to the wrong person … or they need the money for their development gear as Cryengine is known to take a lot of resources. For many of the approached companies the right people had no time, but people at the reception gave me contact information or took my business card to think about my efforts. All in all I am pleased with the first day leaving aside Crytek and Koch Media.

And now for the fun part: I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky in the pre-release version and let it crash several times. The game looks just like the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - just a little better. I’m looking forward to the release. I played Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (Ubisoft) with my butt on the Wii with the creative director of the game throwing snowballs at me. That was real fun I also watched some Spore (EA) and tested it myself for the DS. I played the new Street Fighter 4 game (Capcom) and lost 2:0 in button smashing to a stranger. I tried the new Need for Speed Undercover and I was impressed by the visual damage the car took in crashes. My Audi look kaputt after my 5 minutes test. However behavior of the car is not changed by crashes, just the look of it. Another new racing game is MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. It’s interesting how the developers combined monster trucks and motor bikes in the same game, racing at the same time. Obviously motor bikes are more fun than monster trucks.

A special experience was to play a preview of Sonic Unleashed (Sega) on a HDTV plasma screen. With such a resolution the speed of Sonic is actually fun. Age of Conan was also here with a kind of LARP battle camp with computers inside. Interesting part was the option to play Conan with three TFTs: I call this “3D cave for the poor”. It should transports the feeling of “being inside” better than with a single screen. The feeling is somewhat limited, but its actually there. At EA I tried the preview of the new Harry Potter for the Wii and battled one EA merchandising guy with my wand. It’s now in the same class of games everyone does for the Wii: Instead of button smashing its more like controller swinging. It’s interesting how fast a new input concept can look old.

The new Call of Duty game and Fallout 3 where completely overloaded although only trade visitors were allowed, so I didn’t get a glimpse of those. However those “most prominent” 3D ego shooters where not the critical mass of the GC. Most people played Guitar Hero World Tour (Activision) featuring a band of 4 people with singing, drums, bass and lead guitar. There was a huge lot of sets on at least 4 locations within the GC. Never seen so great many people fooling around with plastic instruments. All in all I was impressed by the big fuss everyone is making about their own games. Most publishers obviously have enough money for PR.

Lire accepted for the Open Source Contest @ ACM MM

Although its quite some time ago that I got the acceptance mail I forgot to blog the good news: Lire (Lucene Image Retrieval) has been acccepted to be presented at the ACM Multimedia within the Open Source Contest track. As it is a contest I assume we have chances to win something?

WIAMIS 2008 talk: Video summarization through acceleration

With the contribution “Redundancy Removing by Adaptive Acceleration and Event Clustering for Video Summarization” Bernard Mérialdo presented a very interesting approach to video summarization. Beside other methods the video is accelerated. Based on the overall motion the actual amount of acceleration is adapted. Furthermore they apply hierarchical clustering on fixed size segments to select most important parts. Therefore the video is faster when not very much motion is going on and slower if fast motion is characteristics for a video segment. Nice added value was hat he described the RUSHES track of TRECVID and the evaluation process. Experts evaluate the accuracy of the summaries and weight them with extraction time and size of the summary.

Some thoughts on the WIAMIS keynote of H. Bischof

In the morning I was listenting to the talk of Horst Bischof on robust people detection in surveillance scenarios. In my opinion he gave a great talk: He manages to show the nature and results of their research and motivate the usefulness and significance of results based on context and related work. He points out what the achievements are and what hasn’t been touched by his research group and why. He also visualized his results using videos which was appreciated by the audience. If I findout where the videos can be found I’ll blog the link.

WIAMIS 2008 starts today …

The 9th International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) takes place for the next three days in Klagenfurt, Austria. As we (the Multimedia Metadata Community) organized a special session there we will gather on Thursday latest and discuss current and upcoming research topics.

While I still have some things to prepare for tomorrow I will visit Horst Bischof’s keynote talk on “Robust Person Detection for Surveillance using Online Learning” and I hope I will find some time to blog about the conference.

Related Links

• WIAMIS Program

Deadline Extension: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

The paper submission deadline has been extended to April 28, 2008.

Original CfP: 

Studies show that sales of digital capture devices like video camera, digital photo cameras, or mobile phones with digital cameras are still rising. Therefore it can be expected that the number of created digital multimedia content will rise dramatically in future. Multimedia metadata is currently the only way to cope with problems like semantics based retrieval or organization of content and provides means to specify adaptation and delivery constraints and rules. Within this special session the importance of metadata for media technologies is discussed. We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Multimedia technologies and metadata in the social web
• Multimedia semantics
• Annotation of multimedia content
• Metadata in pervasive multimedia computing
• Metadata for new media
• Studies and surveys in context of multimedia metadata and new media

We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers.

More Information …

CfP: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

I’m happy to announce that there will be a special session of the Multimedia Metadata Community at the TRIPLE-I / I-Media conference in Graz in September.

CfP: I-Media Special Session on Multimedia Metadata

Studies show that sales of digital capture devices like video camera, digital photo cameras, or mobile phones with digital cameras are still rising. Therefore it can be expected that the number of created digital multimedia content will rise dramatically in future. Multimedia metadata is currently the only way to cope with problems like semantics based retrieval or organization of content and provides means to specify adaptation and delivery constraints and rules. Within this special session the importance of metadata for media technologies is discussed. We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Multimedia technologies and metadata in the social web
• Multimedia semantics
• Annotation of multimedia content
• Metadata in pervasive multimedia computing
• Metadata for new media
• Studies and surveys in context of multimedia metadata and new media

We encourage the submission of high quality scientific work as well as application papers.

Organization

The special session is organized by the Multimedia Metadata Community which has already organized a series of 8 successful workshops in the past taking place in Aachen, Berlin, Graz and Klagenfurt. The Multimedia Metadata Community aims to extend the active and successful community and network with new members.

Submission

Submissions for the special session are handled via the submission system of the TRIPLE-I/I-Media and are reviewed by the TRIPLE-I/I-Media program committee.

14 April 2008: Submission of the full papers (4-8 pages)
31 May 2008: Notification of acceptance
30 June 2008: Camera ready version (8 pages)
3-5 September 2008: TRIPLE-I Conference

Special Session Chairs

• Michael Granitzer, Know-Center Graz
• Mathias Lux, ITEC / Klagenfurt University

Contact: mlux <at> itec <dot> uni-klu.ac.at

Related Links

• Special Session Homepage