SemanticMetadata.net

Two new research papers published

Two research contributions of me and my colleagues finally made their way online. The paper Adaptive Visual Information Retrieval by Changing Visual Vocabulary Sizes in Context of User Intentions by Marian Kogler, Oge Marques and me investigates how the size and generation process of visual word vocabularies influences retrieval for different degrees of intentionality, being a clear search intent, a surfing intent and a browsing intent. The paper Which Video Do You Want to Watch Now? Development of a Prototypical Intention-based Interface for Video Retrieval by Christoph Lagger, Oge Marques and me presents selected results of a large scale study on the motivations of video consumption on the internet.

Social Media, Tagging and Images Semantics

Recently there was quite a buzz around the whole social media topic. Many researchers saw indications that the willingness or people to share and annotate content might lead to new ways of indexing, searching and consuming multimedia. The biggest problems with the buzz is … that it’s BIG Many research groups produced even more papers and with the rising number of papers the scientific impact got smaller and smaller. However Neela Sawant, Jia Li and James Z. Wang took a close look at more than 200 papers and provide a survey on part of the topic with the journal article “Automatic image semantic interpretation using social action and tagging data” in the Multimedia Tools and Applications journal.

Links

• Paper at Springerlink
• PDF at stanford.edu

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

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?

Lire: Submission to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Contest 2008

I recently submitted Lire and LireDemo to the ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition 2008. As I’d really like to go there I hope it will judged as relevant contribution and a demo at the ACM Multimedia is requested. Note that I’ve integrated a new feature in LireDemo for the ACM Multimedia submission: Now its easier to test Lire by just indexing random photos from Flickr. By just hitting the “Index” button without giving a directory of images the download will start automatically.

Links:

• Submission files (~800 kB)

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.

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

Call for Papers “Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web” KASW’08

I wanted to write it myself, but Markus did such a good job …

The focus of this workshop is on techniques and algorithms to acquire knowledge of different forms (e.g. commonsense knowledge, knowledge about user intentions, knowledge about social processes) from social web corpora, such as weblogs, wikis and others. The goal is to attract high quality submissions and to gather a strong community of researchers with different backgrounds that share a common interest in knowledge acquisition from the social web. The Call for Papers is out now – the Submission Deadline is April 28 2008.

International Workshop on
“Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web” KASW’08

held in conjunction with the Triple-I Conference
http://kmi.tugraz.at/workshop/KASW08/

Courses in Summer Semester 2008

Semester started yesterday and therefore also the courses. This semester I’m lecturer and coordinator for 3 courses:

• Multimedia Information Systems – My very own course focusing on Multimedia Retrieval and content based analysis. Takes place 2nd time now, was quite a success the first time: Students and me were satisfied with the agenda of the course and the project results. Find more about it here.
• PR Compiler Construction – A practical course on the basics of compilers to support the compiler construction lecture. There is also a tutorial helping with the implementation tasks of the practical course. Find more information here.
• Computer Games – A first try with my colleague Horst Pichler to create a new course on computer game development bringing together the knowledge of the faculty. While we only had 30 free places in the course and the first lesson will be next week we expect ~ 90 students, which is quite a lot for not mandatory courses in Klagenfurt. Find out more here.

Statistics on Caliph, Emir and Lire

Today I created a presentation on Caliph and Emir and I looked up how long these open source projects are now part of my (online & research) life. In July 2004 I put the first open source version of Caliph & Emir online and ~ 6.700 downloads happened from then till now. Furthermore the Java Web Start files of Caliph and Emir were accessed about 1.300 times. Lire was more successful: Going online in 2006 it was ~3.600 times download till now.

Taking a look around I have to say that Caliph is still the only MPEG-7 tool for semantic descriptions. Due to the fact that it is a prototype (with virtually no productive use) i assume that there is currently no need for such a tool. Reported use is focused on MPEG-7 development and research projects. Lire on the other hand has a more active user base: I know several projects where Lire is used. Seems like there actually is a need for an open source Java library for content based image retrieval.