We were delighted that Bill Bowles attended the MediaEval 2010 workshop and that he made us our own MediaEval video trailer, in which he tells the story of MediaEval from his own point of view. The MediaEval 2010 Affect Task was devoted to analyzing Bill's travelogue video from his Travel Project and ranking it by how boring viewers reported it to be. As a filmmaker, another rational reaction would be "Who are these people, what did they do to my video? I don't want to get anywhere near them!" But instead, he came, participated and told us about ourselves using the very same medium we devote so much effort to studying.
I was amazed at how quickly this video accumulated views, it quickly outstripped any video I've ever posted to the Internet. However, if video is not your thing and you want the text version of what happend here is the text of a workshop report written for a project newsletter.
MediaEval 2010 Workshop Report
The MediaEval 2010 workshop was held on Sunday, October 24, 2010 in Pisa, Italy at Santa Croce in Fossabanda. MediaEval is a benchmarking initiative for multimedia retrieval, focusing on speech, language and contextual aspects of multimedia (geographical and social context) and their combination with visual features. Its central sponsor is the PetaMedia Network of Excellence. In total, four tasks were run during MediaEval 2010. To approach the tasks, participants could make use of spoken, visual, and audio content as well as accompanying metadata. Two “Tagging Tasks’ (a version for professional content and one for Internet video) required participants to automatically predict the tags that humans assign to video content. An ‘Affect Task’ involved automatic prediction of viewer-reported boredom for Travelogue video. Finally, a ‘Placing Task’ required participants to automatically predict the geo-coordinates of Flickr video. The Placing Task was co-organized by PetaMedia and Glocal. It was also given special mention in the talk of Gerald Friedland entitled “Multimodal Location Estimation” in the “Brave New Ideas” session at ACM Multimedia 2010.
During the MediaEval 2010 workshop, researchers presented and discussed the algorithms developed and the results achieved on the MediaEval 2010 tasks. The workshop drew 29 participants from 3 continents. More information about the 2010 results including participants’ short working notes papers, are available at: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2010
Currently, MediaEval 2010 participants are working towards a special session at the 2010 ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2010), which will be dedicated to presenting extended results on MediaEval 2010 tasks.
Mediaeval 2011 will be organized again with sponsorship from PetaMedia and in collaboration with other projects from the Media Search Cluster. The task offering in 2011 will be decided on the basis of participants' interest, assessed, as last year, via a survey. At this time, we anticipate that we will run a Tagging Task and a Placing Task as well as a couple innovative other, new tasks as dictated by popularity. If you are interested in participating in MediaEval 2011 or if your project would like to organize a task, please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl Additional information on MediaEval 2011 is available on the website: http://www.multimediaeval.org
