SemanticMetadata.net

Best Paper Award

“SPCD – SPATIAL COLOR DISTRIBUTION DESCRIPTOR – A Fuzzy Rule based Composite Descriptor Appropriate for Hand Drawn Color Sketches Retrieval” received the best paper award at the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Valencia-Spain, January 22-24, 2010.

Congratulations to Savvas!

Links

• Original post

SeMuDaTe 09 already started

I’m currently in Graz, chairing the first session of SeMuDaTe 09, a community workshop of the multimedia metadata community. I’m looking forward to a day full of interesting talks and discussions. Proceedings of the event are already available at ceur.ws. Our paper on Global vs. Local Feature in Video Summarization will be presented in the afternoon by my colleague Marian Kogler.

Links:

• http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-539/
• Our paper: Global vs. Local Feature in Video Summarization

ACM Multimedia 2009: Project Natal in the Brave New Topics Session …

Yesterday the “brave new topics” session took place. Initially it was meant to present challenging ideas and new things without the demand for extensive evaluation or being picky or realistic. Hrvoje Benko from Microsoft presented a lot of things regarding new output and input interfaces and closed his presentation with the ad for Project Natal. While some of the audience were astonished I still have to point out that especially the multimedia research community has to get a bit closer to gaming. Many of the engineered solutions there can be applied to common problems in multimedia and the other way round. At GDC europe people said problem in game developments are streaming and asset management. On the other hand gaming provides us with cool I/O devices (Dualshock, Sixaxis, Wiimote, etc.) So get together guys

Caliph & Emir @ ACM MM – Presentation on Thursday

I’m currently attending the ACM Multimedia conference in Beijing (nice city by the way, one only has to survive traffic). Tomorrow is out big day for our user intent classification tool “Intent inside” and the day after Claiph and Emir are presented by myself. If you are also her, I’d be happy to meet & greet and talk about further developments, etc.

CfP 2nd International Conferences on Advances in Multimedia

MMEDIA 2010 aims to provide an international forum by researchers, students, and professionals for presenting recent research results on advances in multimedia, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia and to bring together experts from both academia and industry for the exchange of ideas and discussion on future challenges in multimedia fundamentals, mobile and ubiquitous multimedia, multimedia ontology, multimedia user-centered perception, multimedia services and applications, and mobile multimedia.

>> more information

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!

CfP 2nd Workshop on Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems and Applications (DSMSA2009)

In the last decades, substantial progress has been made in content analysis, multimedia streaming, and human-centered computing to facilitate the development of large-scale multimedia systems. Together with the recent progress on semantic web, scalable machine learning, and multi-modal interaction, it is now possible to build a new generation multimedia applications that enable large-scale semantic representation, analysis, and delivery of multimedia data from heterogeneous data sources. However, there is still a long way to go for mature solutions of multimedia database systems that are capable of processing semantics-rich, large-volume multimedia data. It could be even more challenging if such systems are under stringent functional and non-functional (e.g., QoS) requirements.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in multimedia semantic computing and provide a forum for multidisciplinary research opportunities, with a focus on how to apply the semantic technologies to the acquisition, generation, transmission, storage, processing, and retrieval of large-scale multimedia information. Discussions on future challenges in multimedia information manipulation, as well as practical solutions for the design and implementation of multimedia database software systems are also encouraged.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to practical areas that span a variety of aspects of multimedia semantic computing including

• Automatic generation of multimedia presentations
• Semantic multimedia metadata extraction
• Annotation tools and methods for multimedia semantics
• Media ontology generation/learning/reasoning
• Content-based multimedia analysis
• Social media computing
• Web-scale multimedia mining and retrieval
• Multimedia indexing, searching, and retrieving
• Multimedia streaming
• Multimedia data visualization
• Semantic-based QoS control and scheduling
• Semantic-based Internet data streaming and delivery
• Multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-7 and XMP) and Semantic Web
• Semantics enabled multimedia applications (including annotation, browsing, storage, retrieval, and visualization)
• Semantics enabled networking and middleware for multimedia applications
• Service Infrastructure, technology, and tools for Multimedia software systems

Links

• Homepage

Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe 2009)

The workshop is collocated with the 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies SAMT2009 in Graz, Austria – Dec 2-4, 2009.

Ontology-based systems have been developed to structure content and support knowledge retrieval and management. Semantic multimedia data processing and indexing in ontology- based systems is usually done in several steps. One starts by enriching multimedia metadata with additional semantic information possibly obtained by methods for bridging the semantic gap. Then, in order to structure data, a localized and domain specific ontology becomes necessary since the data has to be interpreted domain-specifically. The annotations are stored in an ontology management system where they are kept for further processing. In this scope, Semantic Database Technologies are now applied to ensure reliable and secure access, efficient search, and effective storage and distribution for both multimedia metadata and data. Their services can be used to adapt multimedia to a given context based on multimedia metadata or even ontology information. Services automate cumbersome multimedia processing steps and enable ubiquitous intelligent adaptation. Both, database and automation support facilitate the ubiquitous use of multimedia in advanced applications.

Topics of interest are how multimedia metadata standards and multimedia ontologies are mapped or integrated into databases, how multimedia query languages are built, and how semantic queries are optimized and processed. Moreover, we are interested how multimedia data services are conceived to ensure interoperability, how to improve security and reliability of access and storage of multimedia data and metadata. Adaptation of multimedia, semantic enrichment of multimedia and bridging of media breaks are typical examples of advanced multimedia database services.

The workshop proceedings will be published as a volume at CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of a journal. Previous editions of the workshop have selected for instance journals from the Springer Verlag.

via Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies SeMuDaTe 2009.

ISM 2009: deadline extension

The deadline for full paper submission of the ISM 2009 (IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia) has been extended to July 12th. So we all can reconsider submitting there

Links

• http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/