Fourth
ACM SIGMM eNewsletter

December 2008

Editorial

Dear Member of the SIGMM Community,

We hope that you had a healthy and successful year, and we wish you all the best for 2009. We have enjoyed creating this newsletter for you, we are glad for your support and feedback, and in 2009, we are going to pick up many of the proposals that you have made. So, we want to end this last issue of the SIGMM eNewsletter with an explanation of SIGMM's future newsletter.

These are the three main changes:

• One: We have a name! The newsletter will been known as SIGMM Records.
• Two: We aren't just a throw-away email service any more. The SIGMM Records will be available from the ACM Digital Library.
• Three: We will join with the SIG's website, http://sigmm.org. The newsletter will become more and more integrated with the website and you will find it at http://sigmm.org/records.

Those of you who have contributed to the eNewsletter will wonder whether their contributions will be lost in hyperspace. Most are not! We are going to republish the PhD thesis reports and the Features that you have contributed to the eNewsletter in the SIGMM Records over the course of several editions (don't expect your's in the March 2009 edition). The change of publication style may also mean that an editor will contact you to get additional input.

Starting with the first SIGMM Records, we have a different goal than the eNewsletter. The goal of SIGMM Records is to provide SIGMM members a channel for disseminating their achievements to the research community at large, while the eNewsletter's goal has been to connect the SIGMM community. To achieve this, we will use three distribution channels for the mailing list: it will be available from the ACM Digital Library, it will be available on the sigmm.org website, and we will distribute a compact version through its own, dedicated mailing list. This mailing list will be used exclusively for distributing the newsletter. The newsletter will be distributed 4 times per year, no other postings will be allowed, and the mailing list will be open for subscription by everybody. As an alternative to the announcement on the mailing list, you will be able to subscribe to an RSS feed from sigmm.org.

As a publication in the ACM Digital Library, we will also increase the amount of quality checking that we perform. We will verify every contributors' credentials (such as SIGMM membership where the contribution rules require it), and all contributions will be peer-reviewed. This is necessary because we can't have unverified material in the digital library, even if we are talking about outrageous opinions. We strive to stay advertising-free and to avoid self-promotion outside the material that we request regularly.

The SIGMM Records will be open to many more contributions than the eNewsletter. These will be citable contributions that are available from ACM Digital Library, so we ask you to send us your contributions. But the SIGMM Records aren't a new online magazine or journal that publishes original work. That is the goal of the SIG's proceedings series, of TOMCCAP and MMSJ. SIGMM Records asks SIGMM members to contribute opinions, review papers, books and online material, participate in critical discussions, and to present outrageous opinions, or stories about the dissemination of research. It will finally provide a forum for paper authors to publish comments and errata for those of their papers that have been published by SIGMM and are available from the ACM Digital Library.

We will enable discussions for registered users of the sigmm.org website, and particularly active discussions will be summarized in subsequent issues of the newsletter.

The featured paper will stay part of SIGMM Records, but the angle towards the paper will change. Instead of publishing only a summary or review of the paper, an editor will be in touch with the nominees to get a background story for the featured paper.

Our SIG is the SIG Multimedia and that means that we want multimedia material on our website and in the web-accessible version of the newsletter. If you submit a conference or workshop report, you should provide us with video recordings. SIGMM has made recording of keynotes mandatory, and the newsletter is one way of spreading the news of the event. We will also include a table of contents of all SIGMM conferences and the latest issue of TOMCCAP when they are published in the ACM Digital Library, and provide links to each paper.

SIGMM Records will require more work and that means that the editorial board must grow. Editors' tasks include getting in touch with contributors to add images, videos and animations to their submissions. Authors of featured papers should be interviewed (by email or chat), and we need at least one editor for each specialization with SIGMM.

With this outlook to the new newsletter format, the Editorial Board of the SIGMM eNewsletter concludes 2008 and wishes all of you a Happy and Successful New Year !

Jun, Stephan, Yi and Carsten

Table of Contents

1. Editorial
2. Top 10 ACM SIGMM Downloads
3. PhD thesis abstracts
   • Beomjoo Seo
   • Chrisa Tsinaraki
   • Marek Meyer
   • Michael Ransburg
   • Verena Kahmann
4. Freely available source code, traces and test content
   • Color Descriptor Software for Object and Scene Categorization
   • K-Space Tool and Content Repository: a repository of software tools and datasets for semantic multimedia
5. Calls for Papers
   • SIGMM Sponsored and Co-sponsored Events
   • Events held in cooperation with SIGMM
   • Other multimedia-related Events
6. Award Opportunities
   • EU 7th Research Framework Programme, 4th Call
7. Job Opportunities
   • Postdoc and Researcher Positions in Statistical Machine Learning at Telefonica Research
   • Postdoc and Researcher Positions in Multimedia Data Analysis, Search and Retrieval at Telefonica Research
8. Impressum

Top 10 ACM SIGMM Downloads

Here we present the top downloaded ACM SIGMM articles from the ACM Portal web-site, from July 2008 to October 2008. We are hoping that, this list gives a much deserved exposure to the ACM SIGMM's best articles.

1. Content-based multimedia information retrieval: State of the art and challenges
   Michael S. Lew, Nicu Sebe, Chabane Djeraba, Ramesh Jain
   TOMCCAP, Feburary 2006
   download PDF


2. Wireless network security: comparison of WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) mechanism, WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and RSN (Robust Security Network) security protocols
   Halil Ibrahim Bulbul, Ihsan Batmaz, Mesut Ozel
   Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Forensic applications and techniques in telecommunications, information, and multimedia and workshop, January 2008
   download PDF


3. Content-based image retrieval: approaches and trends of the new age
   Ritendra Datta, Jia Li, James Z. Wang
   Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGMM international workshop on Multimedia information retrieval, November 2005
   download PDF


4. Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification
   Ba Tu Truong, Svetha Venkatesh
   TOMCCAP, February 2007
   download PDF


5. New insights on internet streaming and IPTV
   Zhen Xiao, Fan Ye
   Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Content-based image and video retrieval, Jul-08
   download PDF


6. Phishing attacks and solutions
   Mohamad Badra, Samer El-Sawda, Ibrahim Hajjeh
   Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile multimedia communications, August 2007
   download PDF


7. Web 2.0 dictionary
   Qingxiong Yang, Xin Chen, Gang Wang
   Proceedings of the 2008 international conference on Content-based image and video retrieval, July 2008
   download PDF


8. Foreground object detection from videos containing complex background
   Liyuan Li, Weimin Huang, Irene Y. H. Gu, Qi Tian
   Proceedings of the eleventh ACM international conference on Multimedia, November 2003
   download PDF


9. Support vector machine active learning for image retrieval
   Simon Tong, Edward Chang
   Proceedings of the ninth ACM international conference on Multimedia, October 2001
   download PDF


10. Can we trust digital image forensics?
    Thomas Gloe, Matthias Kirchner, Antje Winkler, Rainer Böhme
    Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia, September 2007
    download PDF

PhD thesis abstracts

• Beomjoo Seo
• Chrisa Tsinaraki
• Marek Meyer
• Michael Ransburg
• Verena Kahmann

Edge Indexing in a Grid for Highly Dynamic Virtual Environments

Newly emerging game-based application systems provide three-dimensional virtual environments where multiple users interact with each other in real-time. Such virtual worlds are filled with autonomous, mutable virtual content which is continuously augmented by the users. To make the systems highly scalable and dynamically extensible, they are usually built on a client-server based grid subspace division where the virtual worlds are partitioned into manageable sub-worlds. In each sub-world, the user continuously receives relevant geometry updates of moving objects via a streaming process from remotely connected servers and renders them according to her viewpoint, rather than retrieving them from a local storage medium.

In such systems, the determination of the set of objects that are visible from a user's viewpoint is one of the primary factors that affect server throughput and scalability. Specifically, performing real-time visibility tests in extremely dynamic virtual environments is a very challenging task as millions of objects and sub-millions of active users are moving and interacting. We recognize that the described challenges are closely related to a spatial database problem, and hence we map the moving geometry objects in the virtual space to a set of multi-dimensional objects in a spatial database while modeling each avatar both as a spatial object and a moving query. Unfortunately, existing spatial indexing methods are unsuitable for this kind of new environments. The main contribution of this research is an efficient spatial index structure that minimizes unexpected object popping and supports highly scalable real-time visibility determination. We uncovered many useful properties of this structure and have compared the index structure with various spatial indexing methods in terms of query quality, system throughput, and resource utilization. We expect our approach to lay the groundwork for next-generation metaverses and virtual world frameworks where geometry data is continuously streamed to each user.

A Semantic-Based Framework for Multimedia Management and Interoperability

Interoperable, semantic-based audiovisual content services are necessary in the open Internet environment, where the volume of the available audiovisual information is growing rapidly. Such services can be built on top of structured, semantic-based audiovisual content descriptions.

This thesis focuses on the representation and management of the audiovisual content semantics. The representation and management of the audiovisual content semantics are based on the dominant standards for audiovisual content description and ontology representation which are, respectively, the MPEG-7 and the OWL. In particular, the following components have been developed for the representation and management of the audiovisual content semantics:

• An MPEG-7 based model that allows: (a) The representation of the audiovisual content semantics; and (b) The representation of domain ontologies that extend the general-purpose MPEG-7 semantics with domain knowledge and may be utilized in the audiovisual content description.

• An ontological infrastructure, which allows the representation and management of the audiovisual content semantics. This ontological infrastructure represents the MPEG-7 semantics and allows their extension with application-specific and domain-specific knowledge.

• A mapping model that allows interoperability support between MPEG-7 and OWL. This model maps the MPEG-7 constructs to OWL constructs and allows the transformation of OWL domain ontologies and OWL/RDF audiovisual content descriptions into MPEG-7 descriptions.

The MP7QL (MPeg-7 Query Language) query language and the MP7QL user preference model have also been developed, in order to allow semantic-based retrieval and filtering of the audiovisual content. The MP7QL query language and the MP7QL user preference model allow for the transparent access to the audiovisual material and the expression of conditions for all the components of the MPEG-7 descriptions. In addition, they allow the explicit specification of boolean operators and preference values for the combination of the conditions according to the user intentions.

The above-referred components (ontological infrastructure, model for the representation of the audiovisual content semantics, mapping model, query language and user preference model) comprise the theoretical basis of the DS-MIRF (Domain-Specific Multimedia Information and Filtering Framework). DS-MIRF allows the development of domain knowledge based applications and services for audiovisual content that utilize and extend the MPEG-7 standard.

The DS-MIRF framework comprises of the following components:

• The DS-MIRF ontological infrastructure, which includes: (a) An OWL-DL Upper Ontology, which captures the semantics of the MPEG-7 standard. Since the MPEG-7 has been expressed in XML Schema syntax, the development of the upper ontology has been based on mapping XML Schema constructs to OWL constructs. The generalization of this methodology led to the development of the XS2OWL mapping model. The XS2OWL mapping model maps XML Schema constructs to OWL constructs, thus allowing the use of Semantic Web tools and methodologies by XML Schema based applications; (b) A set of application ontologies, which extend the upper ontology with application knowledge, so that advanced application support can be provided that utilizes the domain-specific semantics of the different application domains. A semantic user preference ontology, which captures the semantics of the MP7QL user preference model, and a typed relationship ontology have been integrated in the DS-MIRF ontological infrastructure; and (c) A methodology that allows integrating domain ontologies in the DS-MIRF ontological infrastructure. The domain ontologies extend the semantics of the upper ontology and the application ontologies with domain knowledge. The methodology has been tested through the integration of a soccer ontology and a formula 1 ontology.

• Functionality that allows managing MPEG-7 audiovisual content descriptions, user preference descriptions and domain ontologies.

• Audiovisual content browsing, retrieval and filtering functionality, as well as audiovisual content service personalization functionality. The retrieval functionality is based on the MP7QL query language, while the personalization functionality and the filtering functionality are based on the MP7QL user preference model.

• The GraphOnto software component, which was used for the development of the DS-MIRF ontological infrastructure. In addition, the OWL/MPEG-7 mapping model developed in the context of the thesis was implemented in GraphOnto, thus allowing the automatic transformation of OWL domain ontologies and OWL/RDF descriptions into MPEG-7 descriptions.

The audiovisual content semantics representation model developed in the context of this thesis has been applied in the domains of sports and cultural heritage. In the sports domain, the proposed model was evaluated in comparison with the existing approaches, and was shown to be more effective than them in semantic-based retrieval and filtering support for audiovisual content.

Modularization and Multi-Granularity Reuse of Learning Resources

This thesis investigates modular reuse of learning resources. In particular, it considers a scenario of reuse in which existing learning resources serve as preliminary products for the creation of new learning resources for Web based training. Authors are interested in reusing the learning resources created by other authors. It is assumed that these authors belong to different organizations. Furthermore, these authors do not use a common authoring tool because they are obliged to use the tools specified by their respective organizations. There are content models which specify how learning resources may be constructed hierarchically. Authoring paradigms, such as authoring by aggregation, allow in principle a new learning resource to be created as the aggregation of different smaller learning resources. However, it is necessary that the learning resources to be combined are stored as individual resources. This approach works well if an organization systematically creates fine-grained, modular learning resources by using a suitable authoring environment. Many authoring tools use arbitrary content formats that are incompatible with other authoring tools or learning management systems. Thus, learning resources are not exchanged in their source format; instead, the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) specifies a common exchange format for the learning resources. One disadvantage of this format is that the modular components of a learning resource are no longer able to be distinguished as individual learning resources.

This thesis enables the reuse of modular learning resources, which have due to an export process ceased to exist as individual learning resources. There are five contributions in the thesis that address the challenge of modular, multi-granularity reuse.

In the first contribution, an extension to the SCORM specification has been defined which enables the modular reuse of parts of a SCORM package and allows these learning resources to be modularized and aggregated. Furthermore, several approaches for modularization have been reviewed. As a result, a generic process model for the modularization of learning resources resulted from these various approaches. This process model is the second contribution of this thesis.

The third contribution is an extension of an authoring by aggregation process. The authoring by aggregation within existing implementations is restricted to pure content development only. This thesis has extended one of theses processes by a design phase which integrates the light-weight authoring approach of authoring by aggregation. After learning resources from different origins have been obtained and aggregated, the aggregation often looks like a patchwork. It is necessary to adapt the aggregated learning resources towards a unified appearance. This thesis proposes a framework for learning resource content representation and adaptation. This framework enables the development of adaptation tools which are able to work independent of different document formats and focus on a learning resource in its entirety instead of on individual documents.

Finally, the fifth contribution in this thesis is a new approach for the topical classification of learning resources. For cases in which no suitable training corpus is available, Wikipedia the online encyclopaedia is used as a substitute corpus for training machine learning classifiers. An evaluation of the Wikipedia based classifier has shown that it performs significantly better than traditional approaches.

Codec-Agnostic Dynamic and Distributed Adaptation of Scalable Multimedia Content

Today's Internet is accessible to diverse end devices through a wide variety of network types. Independent from this huge amount of usage contexts, content consumers desire to retrieve content with the best possible supported quality. The designers of new media codecs react to this diversity of usage contexts by including adaptation support into the codec design. Scalable media codecs, such as the new MPEG-4 Scalable Video Codec, enable to easily retrieve different qualities of the media content by simply disregarding certain media segments. All these variables (different end devices, network types, user preferences, media codec types, scalability options) lead to a manifold of needed and possible adaptation operations.

In order to counter this complexity, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) standard specifies a set of descriptions (and related processes) in order to describe the media content, the adaptation possibilities and the usage context in the XML domain. The relevant descriptions are: 1) The generic Bitstream Syntax Description (gBSD), which uses a generic language to describe, for instance, the parts of a media content which may be removed for scalability purposes. 2) The Adaptation Quality of Service Description (AQoS), which describes how (segments of) a media content need(s) to be adapted in order to correspond to the various usage contexts, e.g., how many quality layers need to be dropped to correspond to the currently available network bandwidth. 3) The Usage Environment Descriptions (UEDs) which describe the usage context, e.g., the available network bandwidth. Since all of these descriptions, i.e., all codec-specific information, are provided together with the media content, this helps to enable codec-agnostic adaptation nodes, which support any type of scalable media which is properly described by those DIA descriptions.

This thesis extends the static, server-based, gBSD-driven adaptation mechanism towards dynamic and distributed environments. To achieve this, novel mechanisms for fragmentation, storage and transport of content-related XML metadata are introduced. One particular contribution is the introduction of the concept of samples for metadata by employing Streaming Instructions which steer the fragmentation of and provide timing for XML-based metadata. This enables the synchronized processing of such a metadata stream with the described media samples. Furthermore, investigations of the ISO Base Media File Format show how such metadata streams can be stored for later processing. Finally, the applicability of the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) is analyzed for the transport of such metadata streams. A codec-agnostic adaptation node based on these novel mechanisms is implemented and evaluated with regards to its adaptation performance for different types of scalable media. Extensive measurements with these scalable media contents show which parts of the gBSD-based adaptation process (could) benefit most from optimization.

Additionally, a mechanism based on a novel binary header to enable codec-agnostic adaptation of media content is specified. This Generic Scalability Header (GSH) prefixes each media packet payload and is based on the concepts of the gBSD-based adaptation mechanism. It provides information on both the bitstream syntax and the adaptation options and therefore combines (some of) the information provided by the MPEG-21 DIA gBSD and AQoS descriptions. However it enables codec-agnostic adaptation at a considerably lower performance cost. As above, the adaptation performance of this mechanism is evaluated for several types of scalable media. Finally, both mechanisms are implemented in the same adaptation architecture and compared to each other and additionally to a codec-specific adaptation approach using several types of scalable media.

A concluding discussion analyzes the results of the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of both mechanisms. Most notably the measurements show that for MPEG-4 Scalable Video Codec and MPEG-4 Visual Elementary Streams the GSH-based mechanism's throughput is only about 1.25 times lower than for the codec-specific mechanism and the metadata overhead is less than 1 percent. The gBSD-based mechanism comes at a higher cost for these codecs (about 10 times lower throughput and a maximum of 10 percent metadata overhead with compression). We conclude that, depending on the application scenario, both mechanisms can be viable alternatives to existing codec-specific adaptation approaches. In particular in scenarios where contents encoded with diverse (and potentially changing) scalable media codecs need to be adapted, the flexibility of codec-agnostic approaches can outweigh their reduced performance.

Collaborative Media Streaming

At the time being, multimedia services using IP technology are a hot topic for network and service providers. Examples are IPTV, which stands for television broadcast over a (mostly closed) network infrastructure by means of the IP suite, or video on-demand, which allows for watching selected movies via Internet on TV devices or computers in the home.

Technically, these services can be classified under the notion of streaming. A server sends media data in a continuous fashion to one or several clients, which consume data portions as soon as they arrive, mostly displaying them also. By using a feedback channel customers may influence the play-back, since they may watch programs time-shifted or pause the program.

An enhancement of such streaming services is to watch those movies together with a group of people on several devices in parallel, independent from the location of the other group members. Similar approaches have been developed using IP multicast, for example for distributing lectures or conference talks to a group of listeners. However, users cannot control the presentation: pausing or skipping of more unimportant parts is impossible. Moreover, the streaming presentation is announced by means outside the application instead of adding others to the session directly within the application.

The costream architecture developed in this work offers a collaborative streaming service without these limitations: People may retrieve movies, join others watching a movie or invite others to such a collaborative streaming session. Participants of a collaborative streaming session can control the movie presentation like they do on a DVD player. Dependent on the desired course of the session the control operation is executed for all users, or the group is split into subgroups to let watchers follow their own time-lines. For this, a group management controls access to session control operations by means of user roles. Separate from the group management, the so-called association service provides for streaming session control and synchronization among participants.

This separation of duties is advantageous in the sense that standard components can be used: For group management, SIP conferencing servers are suitable, whereas session control can best be handled using RTSP proxies as already used for caching of media data.

Eventually, the evaluation of this architecture shows that such a service offers both low latency for clients and an acceptable synchronization of media streams to different client devices. Moreover, the communication overhead compared to usual conferencing or streaming systems is very low.

Freely available source code, traces and test content

• Color Descriptor Software for Object and Scene Categorization
• K-Space Tool and Content Repository: a repository of software tools and datasets for semantic multimedia

URL: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ksande/research/colordescriptors/

The software of the most successful entries in the TRECVID 2008 video retrieval benchmark and the PASCAL VOC 2008 object classification task, by University of Amsterdam (MediaMill), is now publicly available. This software computes color descriptors in images, including different color histograms and color SIFT versions. These color descriptors describe image regions for object and scene category recognition and have shown to be stable and highly discriminative in multiple application domains.

URL: http://kspace.cdvp.dcu.ie

K-Space is a European Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) Network of Excellence in semantic inference for semi-automatic annotation and retrieval of multimedia content. The aim is to narrow the gap between the content descriptors that can be computed automatically by current machines and algorithms, and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in high-level human interpretations of audiovisual media: The Semantic Gap. More details about the project can be found at http://kspace.qmul.net.

The K-Space Tools and Content Repository contains over 40 publicly available software tools and datasets from the K-Space Network of Excellence in the areas of Content-based Multimedia Analysis, Knowledge Extraction, Multimedia Content Description and Semantic Multimedia.

Calls for Contributions

• Calls for SIGMM Sponsored and Co-sponsored Events
  • Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile 2009)
  • 19th International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digitial Audio and Video
• Calls for Events held in cooperation with SIGMM
  • Future Multmedia Networking (FMN 2009)
• Other multimedia-related Events
  • Eurographics 2009 Workshop on 3D object retrieval
  • Special Issues on Enhancing Privacy Protection in Multimedia Systems
  • 1st Workshop on Internet Multimedia Search and Mining
  • The 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment
  • Special Issue on MMOG Systems and Applications

SIGMM Sponsored and Co-sponsored Events

Full paper Deadline: January 12, 2009 (Poster and Demo)
Event location: Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Event date: February 23-24, 2009
URL: http://www.hotmobile.org/2009
Sponsored by ACM SIG Multimedia

ACM HotMobile 2009, the Tenth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications continues the series of highly selective, interactive workshops focused on mobile applications, systems, and environments, as well as their underlying state-of-the-art technologies. HotMobile's small workshop format makes it ideal for presenting and discussing new directions or controversial approaches.

Full paper Deadline: February 9, 2009
Event location: Williamsburg, Virginia, USA
Event date: June 3-5, 2009
URL: http://www.nossdav.org/2009
Sponsored by ACM SIG Multimedia

NOSSDAV 2009 will continue the workshop's long tradition of focusing on emerging topics, controvesial ideas, and future research directions in the area of multimedia systems research. The workshop will be held in a setting that stimulates lively discussions among the senior and junior participants. It is an established practice for NOSSDAV to encourage experimental research based on real systems and data sets. Further, public availability of source code and data sets is highly encouraged. For NOSSDAV 2009, we would like to especially highlight two new topics of interest: novel use of GPU for multimedia and multi-core processors support for multimedia.

Events held in cooperation with SIGMM

Full paper Deadline: January 31, 2009
Event location: Coimbra, Portugal
Event date: June 22-23, 2009
URL: http://fmn2009.dei.uc.pt/
In cooperation with ACM SIG Multimedia

The objective of the Future Multimedia Networking (FMN 2009) workshop is to discuss state-of-the-art research and developing activities contributing to aspects of multimedia systems, content networking, and autonomous communication. We are inviting both theoretical and experimental papers as well as work-in-progress research.

Other multimedia-related Events

Full paper Deadline: January 9, 2009
Event location: Munich, Germany
Event date: March 29, 2009
URL: http://3dor.ge.imati.cnr.it/About.html

3D content is now widely recognized as the upcoming wave of digital media. Inexperience and professional users are becoming more and more actively involved in the content creation pipeline and ask for intuitive and effective tools for creating, sharing, retrieving and re-using 3D content. Search and retrieval of 3D objects is therefore rapidly become a key issue in the upcoming panorama of multimedia content, both in general usage scenarios, such as online gaming or 3D social networks, and in scientific domains, such as molecular biology and medicine. The aim of this workshop is to stimulate researchers from different fields (computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, semantic web) who work on the common goal of 3D object retrieval.

Full paper Deadline: March 1, 2009
Event location: EURASIP Journal on Information Security
URL: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/is/si/ppms.html

The goal of this special issue is to collect cutting-edge research work in privacy protection technologies for multimedia, and to provide a high-quality forum for researchers from different areas to explore future opportunities in this area. This special issue is to be published in September 2009.

Full paper Deadline: February 8, 2009
Event location: Cancun, Mexico
Event date: July 3, 2009
URL: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/xshua/imsm/

Recently more and more researchers are realizing both the challenges and the opportunities for multimedia research brought by the Internet. This workshop aims at bringing together high-quality and novel research works on "Internet Multimedia", or more specifically, Internet-based multimedia search as well as Internet-based multimedia mining.

Full paper Deadline: February 16, 2009
Event location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Event date: June 22-24, 2009
URL: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/intetain09

Intetain 09 intends to stimulate interaction among academic researchers and commercial developers of interactive entertainment systems. Contributions may, for example, contribute to this theme by focusing on the Supporting Device Technologies underlying interactive systems, on the Intelligent Computational Technologies used to build the interactive systems, or by discussing the Interactive Applications for Entertainment themselves.

Full paper Deadline: January 15, 2009
URL: http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~shervin/mmogsi/

Guest Editors: Shervin Shirmohammadi (University of Ottawa), Marc Claypool (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

This is a special issue on MMOG Systems and Applications, in Springer's Multimedia Tools and Applications journal. It will cover enabling technologies and systems for MMOGs, as well as applications of MMOGs outside of gaming. The focus will be mostly on the "massive" aspect of games.

Tentative publication date: late 2009

Award Opportunities

• EU 7th Research Framework Programme, 4th Call

More info: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/

The 4th call of the FP7 Programme calls for project proposals addressing the topics: pervasive and trusted network and service infrastructures; cognitive systems, interactions, robotics; components, systems, engineering; towards sustainable and personalized healthcare; ICT for mobility, environmental sustainability and energy efficiency; ICT for independent living, inclusion and participatory governance.

Job Opportunities

• Postdoc and Researcher Positions in Statistical Machine Learning at Telefonica Research
• Postdoc and Researcher Positions in Multimedia Data Analysis, Search and Retrieval at Telefonica Research

Employer: Telefonica Research
Valid until: June 1, 2009
More info: http://www.nuriaoliver.com/News.htm

Postdoc and researcher positions in the newly formed Multimedia research team at Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). Looking for creative, dynamic and resourceful PhD graduates to join our research efforts in Statistical Machine Learning for the analysis of multimodal data.

Employer: Telefonica Research
Valid until: June 1, 2009
More info: http://www.nuriaoliver.com/News.htm

Postdoc and researcher positions in the newly formed Multimedia research team at Telefonica Research (Barcelona, Spain). Looking for creative and resourceful individuals to join our research efforts in Multimedia Data Analysis, Search and Retrieval. The successful candidate will join a multidisciplinary and international team of scientists.

More information here: http://www.nuriaoliver.com/Recruiting/MultimediaJob.pdf

Impressum

Editor-in-Chief

Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research Laboratory

Editors

Stephan Kopf, University of Mannheim
Jun Wang, University College London
Yi Cui, Vanderbilt University