On events in multimedia research

Back at home -- I promised to provide some summary of impression from the events in multimedia workshop I attended earlier this week.    Meanwhile some of the presentation have been uploaded to the workshop website, as well as some pictures.    I recommend to view the presentation of  Ansgar Shcerp, it is the most interesting one (to me). 

I was not familiar with the multimedia research until being invited to this conference to have a dialogue with them.  My impression is that what they are doing is complementary to what we do in the event processing universe.   We assume that events exist and we need to process them, they start from pictures and video streams and try to detect what event is described in the picture, they care less about what somebody does with the event after being detected.    They have long discussions about "what is an event",  events that they have talked about in some talks are social events, sport events etc.   I think that a synergy between different communities who deal with different phases of the event processing story is vital in order to exploit events that come from multimedia sources, and will continue the dialogue with them/.  

On event semantics -- my talk in the event-based multimedia workshop

Still in Barcelona for the event-based multimedia workshop.   I still need to write on the second day and the closing panel (in which I also participated), and my impression about the event-based multimedia community.

Meanwhile -- I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare, parts of it is reuse of other presentation (e.g. the slides explaining the notion of context),  the new stuff is about the semantics -- who are the players in the event game.    I am planned to give a long tutorial on event modeling in ER 2013 next month - stay tuned. 

Workshop on event-based media integration and processing - the first day

This is the logo of the ACM multimedia 2013 conference that is taking place these days in Barcelona.

Co-located with this conference (we share the coffee in the coffee break) is the event-based media workshop which I am attending.  My talk is planned for today, so yesterday I was just a listener in the first day.   Here are some impressions:

The most interesting talk was the one by Ramesh Jain,  who is working on events in multimedia for a while.

Ramesh talked about cybernetics in society, and about smart systems defined as smart actions in respond to smartly detected situations.   He also talked about social networks and the Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Ramesh said that the social media concentrates on the third and fours layer - love/belonging and esteem,and posed as a challenge to get more focused on the basic needs - the two lower layers.  

Ramesh also talked about the 4V of big data,  Saying that the volume is the least important one -- as there are methods to partition the space, but the other three actually issue -- event processing in multimedia under uncertainty.  Ramesh mentioned  the Israeli company Waze (recently acquired by Google) as example of a smart social system.  

Some of the other talks concentrated about analysis of pictures that are put on social networks and try to identify the event they are describing, first see if they describe an event, and then identify the event - talking about sport events, public events, family events and more.   It is funny, since some of the event definitions view event as instantaneous occurrence - and then a sport event (say football game) is not an event since it takes (net) 90 minutes.  I guess that there are different views of events -- I'll mention it in my talk today.