Archive for the ‘Related initiatives’ Category

Introduction

Currently, more than 80% of the information exchanged on the Web carry personal data and are primarily of multimedia nature (video, audio, images, etc.). Two main reasons are behind this phenomenon: 1) each of the major players on the Internet (individual users, companies, local and/or regional authorities, etc.) is both data producer and data consumer at the same time, and 2) the use of various tools of Web 2.0 (blogs, social networks, etc.) allows to ease sharing, accessing, and publishing information on the Web. While such tools provide users many easy-to-use functionalities, several issues, however, remain unaddressed. For instance, how to automate the processes of annotation and description of some photos using the annotations/descriptions provided by the user friends on his/her blog/wiki/social network? How to provide the user with more effective and expressive means to multimedia information retrieval? How to protect a multimedia data repository (e.g., photo album) while several related information about the same content is already published (by some user friends) on the same or other blog/wiki/social network?

The general aim of this special issue is to assess the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the use of Web 2.0 in providing automatic annotation and easing retrieval and access control of multimedia data. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art and future directions in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Semantic Web and Web 2.0
• Social Networks
• Multimedia Semantics
• Contextual Multimedia Metadata
• Annotation Enriching
• Query Rewriting
• Metadata Modeling and Contextual Ontologies for Multimedia Applications
• Management of Multimedia Metadata (Relational and XML Databases, Semantic Stores, etc.)
• Multimedia Authoring
• Multimedia-based Access Control and Authorization
• Multimedia Retrieval
• Personalizing Multimedia Content
• Cross-media Clustering
• Mobile Applications
• Multimedia Web Applications and Related Metadata Support
• Novel and Challenging Multimedia Applications

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: November 15, 2010
• Notification of First Round of Review: January 30, 2011
• Submission of the Revised Manuscript: March 15, 2011
• Notification of Final Acceptance: April 30, 2011
• Camera-ready Submission: May 30, 2011

Submission

Authors are invited to submit contributions at the journal Online Submission System ( http://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap ) not exceeding 8000 words (approx. 20 pages single-spaced) including diagrams and references with at least 10-point Times Roman like font. All submissions will undergo a blind peer review by at least three external expert reviewers to ensure a high standard of quality. Referees will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity of exposition, and relevance to the special issue topics above. Since a “blind” paper evaluation method will be used, authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the full paper, WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors. The manuscript must contain, in its first page, the paper title, an abstract and a list of keywords but NO NAMES OR CONTACT DETAILS WHATSOEVER are to be included in any part of this file.

Guest Editors

• Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France, richard.chbeir@u-bourgogne.fr)
• Vincent Oria (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, oria@homer.njit.edu)

It seems that, although there are many opponents to the badge-oriented mechanism to involve users, considering it non-sense (see the comments on the TechCrunch’s blog entry), badges are an effective mechanism to get users participating. The point seems to be adding value to the “simple” fact of badge gathering.

You can read the whole article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/brightkite-badges/

You can read the whole article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_adds_facial_recognition.php .

TAGtheLOOK is a Facebook application by Uppy Media. It lets users interactively tag their own or their friends’ outfits in existing social network photo albums and share with their friends using a real time feed. Ultimately, it takes users to online shopping.

Uppy Media won DEMO gold award among alpha pitch companies in DEMO 2010 spring conference. See the video here.

The company makes money through affiliate links, so if you just have to have that dress your best mate wore on Friday night, you’re in luck – and so are Uppy.

For similar ideas in this space check out Pixazza, Udorse , and Coolspotters.

Applications are invited for the position of “Post-doctoral Research Fellow” as part of a joint research project between the Masdar Institute of Science& Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project’s Principal Investigators are:

• Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
• Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf