For those of you interested in the poster I uploaded it here.

I also uploaded the presentation to slideshare.

Submission Deadline: 1 March 2011

The field of spoken content indexing and retrieval has a long history dating back to the development of the first broadcast news retrieval systems in the 1990s. More recently, however, work on searching speech has been moving towards spoken audio that is produced spontaneously and in conversational settings. In contrast to the planned speech that is typical for the broadcast news domain, spontaneous, conversational speech is characterized by high variability and the lack of inherent structure. Domains in which researchers face such challenges include: lectures, meetings, interviews, debates, conversational broadcast (e.g., talk-shows), podcasts, call center recordings, cultural heritage archives, social video on the Web, spoken natural language queries and the Spoken Web.
We invite the submission of papers that describe research in the following areas:

• Integration of information retrieval algorithms with speech recognition and audio analysis techniques
• Interfaces and techniques to improve user interaction with speech collections
• Indexing diverse, large scale collections
• Search effectiveness and efficiency, including exploitation of additional information sources

For more information see http://tois.acm.org/announcement.html

Streaming video has recently surpassed peer-to-peer networks in terms of network capacity hunger. Reports estimate a share of 40% of peak network capacity dedicated to entertainment, mostly streaming video. A large share of this traffic originates from web based services. YouTube alone takes up to 8% of the prime time internet traffic. So multimedia on the web is currently a big issue. While transmission currently works in a best effort system, multimedia information system on the web are far from being perfect. Retrieval, annotation, validated and useful metadata, reliable and trusted services, and user interaction and context-based adaptation are still under discussion and allow improvement. Currently, the Web itself faces dramatic changes, looking for example at the spread of social networks, Linked Data or the impact of HTML5 or WebM. These activities also have a deep effect on multimedia data and content provider. Following this, we aim to bring together researchers from the area of multimedia and the web to discuss innovative ideas and new directions in this workshop.

Topics of interest

We encourage the submission of high quality papers from applied and basic research as well as applications for multimedia on the web. Submissions have to relate to multimedia on the web, or more specifically on the following topics:

• Annotation of multimedia for the web
• Multimedia databases and metadata models
• Multimedia & metadata adaptation
• Multimedia in the social web
• Multimedia user communities
• Multimedia semantics & ontologies for the web
• Proactive delivery and recommender systems
• Semantic multimedia information services
• User interaction & context
• Web based emergence and self-organization
• Web based multimedia search and retrieval

Organization

The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Metadata Community which has already organized many successful events in the past. The Multimedia Metadata Community aims to extend the active and successful community and network with new members.

Submission

Full-paper submissions are limited to a maximum of 4 pages and demo/poster submission to 2 pages. The papers must be in English and should be formatted according to the IEEE 2-column format. All submitted papers will be issue to a peer review by at least 3 program committee members. The publishing media for the workshop is currently under negotiation and will be announced in subsequent call for papers.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: April 30th, 2011
• Notification of acceptance: May 20th, 2011
• Camera ready papers due: June 15th, 2011

Chairs

• Laszlo Böszörmenyi, Klagenfurt University, Austria (General Chair)
• Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University, USA (Co-Chair)
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria (Co-Chair)
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, Germany (Co-Chair)
• Florian Stegmaier, Passau University, Germany (Demo Chair & W3C Liaison)
• Werner Bailer, Joanneum Research, Austria (Demo Chair & W3C Liaison)

Contact

For any requests, please contact chairs [at] mmweb2011 [dot] org.

Links

• http://www.acmmm10.org/volunteers/

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

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!

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

Links

• Online proceedings

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

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/)