Back home after a week of multimedia. In my opinion, the prevalent themes of ACM Multimedia 2008 and the associated conference on multimedia information retrieval (MIR) seemed to be social multimedia retrieval (with a lot of Flickr and geo-tag related work) and affective multimedia retrieval (with a lot of music/video analysis using valence/arousal curves). Overall, the quality of the conference was quite high, certainly a worthwhile visit. I enjoyed especially the interaction with friends, the demo sessions, and the keynotes at MIR by Tom Huang, Ramesh Jain, and Shih-Fu Chang. Not surprisingly, they all seemed to agree that the semantic gap is still the major scientific problem to solve. Interestingly, however, they all three believe the solution might come from users interacting with multimedia on the Internet. I fully subscribe to their conclusion.
This week I am attending the ACM Multimedia conference in Vancouver. The ‘city of glass’ is proclaimed to be one of the best places to live in the world. This could be due to the many possibilities for outdoor activities in the direct viccinity of the city. One such activity is hiking, which we did today. Together with Xirong, Marcel, and Bouke we went to Lake Garibaldi. It took us some time to get there, but it was certainly worthwhile. The view was magnificent. Luckily the conference starts tomorrow, so that we have some time to recover. I wonder whether there are some interesting developments in the multimedia field to report the coming days.
Good news, my research proposal entitled: SEARCHER: Substituting Experts by Amateurs for Concept-based Video Retrieval was awarded a prestigious VENI Innovational Research Incentives Scheme grant by the Dutch organization for Scientific Research (NWO). See the official press release. I will be working on this project for at least the coming three years :)
Is a blog :)
Stay tuned in 2008…
