The Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) is organizing a multimedia search competition, check their website at http://www.thestarchallenge.sg/. As of yet the competition details are a bit vague, they talk about voice and video tasks, but the prize money sure is interesting ;)
The new year is already boosting a lot of activity: I just submitted an exciting grant proposal, got invited for the technical program committee of the 2008 ACM Multimedia Conference, and I was also invited to attend the Dagstuhl Seminair on Contextual and Social Media Understanding and Usage in Germany. This topic certainly has my attention and will no doubt generate a lot of interesting research the coming years.
