The International MultiMedia Modeling Conference (MMM) is a leading international conference for researchers and industry practitioners to share their new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all MMM related areas. MMM2012 welcomes proposals for special sessions focusing on specific new challenges in multimedia research. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• 3D object and face retrieval
• Annotation and multimedia metadata
• Cross-modal and cross-media analysis and modeling
• Events and actions in multimedia
• Multimedia in interactive entertainment
• Music and audio content analysis
• Modeling user context in multimedia retrieval

Also the topics mentioned in the conference call for papers in the fields of multimedia content analysis, multimedia signal processing and communications, and multimedia applications and services (see also http://mmm2012.org/call-for-papers/) are of interest for the special session.

A typical MMM special session features 5-6 contribution discussing the proposed topic. The proposal should include the following information:

• Tentative title of the proposed special session
• Names and affiliations of the organizers (including brief bio and contact information)
• Session abstract (statement of the significance of topic)
• List of potential contributors (together with tentative paper titles) who agree to submit a paper if the proposal is accepted

Proposals will be evaluated based on the timeliness and significance of the topic, as well as the qualifications of the organizers and the tentative papers proposed.

Papers of accepted special sessions need to be submitted using the MMM2012 conference submission system. Special session organizers will be responsible for managing the review process of the papers submitted to their special sessions. All special session papers will be included in the conference proceedings.

Important dates:

• Proposal submission: June 6, 2011
• Notifications: June 20, 2011
• Papers submission: July 22, 2011

Special session co-chairs:

• Marco Bertini, Università di Firenze, Italy, bertini<at>dsi.unifi.it
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria, mlux<at>itec.uni-klu.ac.at

For more information, please visit http://www.mmm2012.org/

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.

User Intentions in Image Production, Sharing, and Retrieval

The lifecycle of images and other types of visual information contains numerous actions that are triggered by user intentions and goals. Every little action, from content production to retrieval of previously stored visual information, takes the user a step forward towards a state where a user assumes that a goal has been achieved. Examples of such intentions are “learn how to tie a tie”, “be entertained” or “show video of a holiday to relatives”.

With the advent of social systems and its social multimedia networks, the actions of a user have become more and more transparent. Comments, ratings, recommendations, search queries and history, upload activity logs, and communication records can be analyzed to infer a user’s goal. This goal can then be used to leverage retrieval of multimedia content and to better adapt multimedia systems to users’ needs. Moreover, the goals of content producers and providers can be analyzed and matched with the goals of the content consumers.

Content-based analysis, indexing and search of visual information often does not take the user’s intentions into account. Research activity on the user roles in multimedia systems has, so far, focused on specific topics (e.g., “personalized multimedia delivery” or “adaptive multimedia systems”). Investigating the actual intentions or goals of a user throughout the lifecycle of image production, sharing, and retrieval is a fairly young research topic that has just recently started to attract attention from the multimedia research community.

In this special session we want to bring together researchers and practitioners from the visual information retrieval, image analysis and multimedia systems research. We aim to discuss recent scientific advances and also first results of greenhouse work on user intentions in multimedia.

Submission

Submission deadline is Dec 10, 2011. Additional information is available at http://www.wiamis2011.org/

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to)

• User intentions in visual content production
• User intentions in visual content sharing
• User intentions in visual information retrieval
• User intentions and image sharing in social networks
• Models and taxonomies for user intentions in multimedia in narrow domains (e.g., medical imaging, video surveillance, how-to videos, etc.)
• Multimedia metadata for user intentions
• Analysis and mining of user goals and intentions
• Studies on user goals, motivations and intentions in multimedia  systems
• Methods to leverage user intentions in multimedia applications

Organizers

• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria (mlux [at] itec [dot] uni-klu [dot] ac [dot] at)
• Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University, USA (omarques [at] fau [dot] edu)

Multimedia applications have become ubiquitous lately. People record and watch videos on mobile and stationary devices, they use non linear video editors, and they share and organize their personal multimedia archives. Lots of research has been  done on the technical aspects  of multimedia, like streaming, presentation, transcoding, adaptation and content  based retrieval  and  analysis.  But  handling  multimedia  is  an interactive process and  users have  to be  taken into  account. Even consumption is often accompanied  with communication,  non linear  browsing and search. This interactivity in multimedia applications is a challenging yet  very promising topic  as especially  in multimedia  applications people  more often accept innovative ideas and fundamental changes more easily.

This workshop should bring  together researchers and practitioners  from the fields of Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction research  (HCI). In this workshop we aim  to discuss recent scientific advances  and also first results of greenhouse work in the field of interactive  multimedia applications.  We also  encourage the  submission of  papers presenting studies  on  interactivity  in  multimedia  systems  or  discussing  the development of applications in this field.

Topics of interest
Topics include the aspects of interactivity in the following fields:

• Multimedia Retrieval, Browsing & Navigation
• User Intentions in Multimedia Search, Annotation & Production
• Multimedia Production and Post-Production
• Multimedia in Specialized Domains (e.g. Medical Scenarios, Sports, Security, etc.)
• Image, Audio and Video Analysis
• Mobile Multimedia Applications
• Multimedia on the Web
• Social Multimedia
• Multimedia Management and Databases
• Distributed Multimedia Systems

We also encourage the submission of greenhouse work and preliminary results to be discussed in the workshop.

Submission
Authors are invited to submit papers in the following categories:

• Full papers (14-20 pages)
• Short papers (6-14 pages)
• Posters (4 pages)

All papers have  to be formatted  according to the  Springer LNCS Style. Submission is handled by easychair, see http://tinyurl.com/wima2010 for details.

Important Dates

• EXTENDED to July 11, 2010 Deadline for Paper Submission
• July 30, 2010 Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
• August 22, 2010 Camera-Ready Deadline
• Nov 4 & 5, 2010 USAB 2010: HCI in Work & Learning, Life & Leisure

Program Committee

• Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Dalibor Mitrovic, TU Wien, AT
• Frank Hopfgartner, International Computer Science Institute, USA
• Harald Kosch, University of Passau, DE
• Mario Döller, University of Passau, DE
• Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, AT
• Martha Larson, TU Delft, NL
• Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University, US
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, DE
• Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia, P.R. China
• Vincent Charvillait, ENSEEIHT Toulouse, FR
• Werner Bailer, Joanneum Research, AT
• Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen, DE
• Yu Cao, California State University of Fresno, US

Workshop Chairs

• Klaus Schöffmann, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Laszlo Böszörmenyi, Klagenfurt University, AT
• Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, AT

For further questions please contact the program chairs at wima2010 <at> itec.uni-klu.ac.at

More information available at http://www.p2pstreaming.eu

Paper submission deadline: June 10, 2010

Abstract. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a promising technology for video streaming, and offers advantages in terms of robustness, re-configurability and scalability. In this context, social networks and social services are emerging as a potential new driver for content delivery networks. Specifically, social networks potentially provide a new level of understanding and knowledge related to the interaction between people within a virtual space. Many emerging multimedia based services and applications have started to exploit the ‘social graph’ in new ways for establishing a basis for social recommendations, filtering etc.). As yet, one unexplored area of research relates to the exploiting the social graph for informing adaptive behaviour in P2P-based multimedia systems. On the other hand, the P2P video technology is still challenging, due to the need of reducing start-time and churn-induced instability, to the asymmetry of residential broadband connections, and to high packet loss rates due to router congestion and transmission errors on the physical network, node departure from the P2P overlay, strict timing out due to real time visualization. The lack of guarantee about the actual delivery of the data may cause drops in the reproduction quality and service outages. The workshop objective is to solicit novel contributions on all aspects of P2P-based video coding, streaming, and content distribution which is informed by social networks.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative P2P-based video streaming solutions
• P2P-based social media content distribution networks
• Advanced video coding techniques for real-time P2P applications:  layered/scalable video coding, multiple description coding, distributed  source coding
• Identification and design of proper metrics for performance evaluation and  monitoring including Quality of Service/Experience
• Content and context analysis and modelling for P2P-based social media  distribution
• Filtering and recommendation systems
• Error-resilience tools for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• Rate control and bandwidth adaptation for both single streams and multiple  stream multiplexing
• Cross layer optimization issues
• Protocols for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• P2P streaming prototype implementation for both live and on-demand streaming
• Advertisement, payment, and cashing systems
• Applications, standards, and practical deployments

http://www.mobimedia.org/ws_SVCVision.html

Aims and Scope

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) refers to the possibility of removing certain parts of a video bit stream in order to adapt it to a changing usage environment, e.g., end device capabilities, network condition or user preferences. SVC has been an active standardization and research area for at least 20 years, reaching back to H.262/MPEG-2, which offered scalable profiles. However, these previous attempts suffered from a significant loss in coding efficiency as well as a large increase in decoder complexity (and thus energy consumption), which hindered market adoption. Only the most recent attempt, i.e., the SVC extension of H.264/AVC, focuses on avoiding these disadvantages. Since H.264/SVC standardization started in 2003, it has been at the focus of many multimedia research groups.

Today’s increasing variety of end devices (smart phones, tablet PCs, Netbooks, Laptops, PCs, networked HDTVs, …) and the associated multitude of Internet connectivity options (GPRS/EDGE, UMTS, ADSL, PLC, WiMAX, …) provide particular momentum for SVC, which can be easily and pervasively adapted to these various usage environments. SVC also allows end devices to only decode a sub-set of the SVC bit stream, thus enabling in particular mobile end devices to minimize the necessary (processing) power requirements.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for both academic and industrial participants to exchange and discuss recent advancements and future perspectives of SVC.

Topics

SVC topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Robust streaming, error resilience and error concealment
- Streaming in heterogeneous environments
- Peer-to-Peer (P2P) video distribution
- Internet Protocol television (IPTV)
- Energy-efficient video distribution
- Content adaptation (e.g., scaling, rewriting, transcoding) and summarization
- Complexity optimization and new tools for achieving scalability
- Adaptation decision taking & context information
- Storage & file format
- Conditional access & protection
- Novel applications & implementation experiences

Important Dates

Paper Submission: 23. April 2010
Notification: 28. May 2010
Camera Ready: 25. June 2010

All accepted papers will be published in Springer Lecture Notes of ICST (LNICST) series and included in major article indexing services.

• new modeling techniques and approaches for social media
• models of propagation and influence in twitter, blogs and social tagging systems
• models of expertise and trust in twitter, wikis, newsgroups, question and answering systems
• modeling of social phenomena and emergent social behavior
• agent-based models of social media
• models of emergent social media properties
• models of user motivation, intent and goals in social media
• cooperation and collaboration models
• software-engineering and requirements models for social media
• adapting and adaptive hypertext models for social media
• modeling social media users and their motivations and goals
• architectural and framework models
• user modeling and behavioural models
• modeling the evolution and dynamics of social media

More information can be found on the workshop home page.

Links

• http://kmi.tugraz.at/workshop/MSM10/

• Submission due: 28th February 2010
• Workshop dates: 19th-20th May 2010
• Workshop venue: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain)

In the Web 2.0, a growing amount of multimedia content is being shared on Social Networks. Due to the dynamic and ubiquitous nature of this content (and associated descriptors), new interesting challenges for indexing, access, and search and retrieval have arisen.
In addition, there is a growing concern on privacy protection, as a lot of personal data is being exchanged. Teenagers (and even younger kids), for example, require special protection applications; while adults are willing to have a higher control over the access to content.
Furthermore, the integration of mobile technologies with the Web 2.0 applications is also an interesting area of research that needs to be addressed; not only in terms of content protection, but also considering the implementation of new and enriched context-aware applications.
Finally, social multimedia is also expected to improve the performance of traditional multimedia information search and retrieval approaches by contributing to bridge the semantic gap. The integration of these aspects, however, is not trivial and has created a new interdisciplinary area of research.
In any case, there is a common issue that needs to be addressed in all the previously identified social multimedia applications: the interoperability and extensibility of their applications. Thus, the workshop is particularly interested in research contributions based on standards.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
•       Privacy in social networks
•       Access control in social networks
•       Social media analysis
•       Social media retrieval
•       Context-awareness in social networks
•       Mobile applications scenario
•       Social networks ontologies and interoperability
•       Security and privacy ontologies
•       Content distribution over social networks
•       Multimedia ontologies and interoperability
•       Multimedia search and retrieval
•       Semantic metadata management
•       Collaborative tagging
•       Interaction between access control and privacy policies
•       Social networks and policy languages
•       Policy management

Research Papers: Papers should describe original and significant work in the research and industrial practice of related topics. (i) Long papers: up to 8 pages, will normally be particularly focused on research studies, applications and experiments (ii) Short papers: up to 4 pages, will be particularly suitable for reporting work-in-progress, interim results, or as a position paper submission.

Applications and Industrial Presentations: Proposals for presentations of applications and tools, including reports on the application and utilisation of tools, industrial practices and models, or tool/system demonstrations. Abstract: 2 pages.

All submissions and proposals are to be in English and submitted in PDF format at the WISMA paper submission web site (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wisma2010) on or before 28th February 2010. Papers should be formatted according to LNCS style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0). The workshop proceedings are to be published as a volume at CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org).