The WWW Conference has published its Companion Proceedings online at  http://www2013.org/papers/companion.htm and the first Worldwide Workshop on Linked Media (LiME 2013) is included! Check out the keynote of LinkedTV scientific co-ordinator Lyndon Nixon on the importance of Linked Media to the Future Web (the slides are also on Slideshare) as well as the seven accepted papers. Direct links from the workshop agenda to the proceedings publication have been added at the LiME workshop event page.

MediaMixer will be presented at the Metadata Developer Network Workshop 2013 (http://tech.ebu.ch/MDN2013), organised by the European Broadcasters Union. June 5-6 2013, Geneva, Switzerland. The talk “MediaMixer: facilitating media fragments mixing and its rights management using semantic technologies” to be given by Roberto García of the University of Lleida will focus on how Media Fragments will be also linked to rights information based on a copyright ontology, which integrates licenses, policies and rights expressions based on existing standards like DDEX, ODRL or MPEG-21.

MediaMixer has co-supported the first worldwide workshop on Linked Media (LiME) together with the EU project LinkedTV at the World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013). The workshop has promoted for the first time to the international Web community the vision and goals of “Linked Media”. MediaMixer promotes technology for eased publication and re-use of fragments of audiovisual media across the Web, which can be part of the Linked Media vision. Project co-ordinator Lyndon Nixon held a keynote talk at the workshop outlining his goals for making Linked Media a reality – the keynote slides can be seen at http://de.slideshare.net/linkedtv/www-linked-media-keynote

Yesterdays first Worldwide Workshop on Linked Media (LIME 2013) brought together over 20 participants to present on and discuss work related to the vision and goal of Linked Media. Firstly, LinkedTV scientific co-ordinator keynoted on what is Linked Media precisely, an important question for building a research community around the topic. His keynote slides are now published, see them below:

The importance of Linked Media to the Future Web from LinkedTV

Seven further workshop presentations covered topics from linking within video collections to viewer attention tracking. The workshop TitanPad contains links to demos or videos for every presentation. A closing discussion on Linked Media noted that the included topics were very broad and that a categorization of problems would be useful to better structure discussion. What is the core concept of Linked Media?

We hope, within the LinkedTV project and involving external, interested voices, to further define and push forward the Linked Media vision.

The World Wide Web conference is the annually largest and most important meeting on Web technologies. ConnectME is pleased to be presenting its innovative Web technology for video annotation and enriched playout during the event.

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If the future Web will be able to fully leverage the scale and quality of online media, a Web scale layer of structured, interlinked media annotations is needed. This layer, which we call Linked Media (inspired by the Linked Data movement for making structured, interlinked descriptions of resources better available online), is a fundamental part of the vision of the LinkedTV project. In our view, an automated enrichment of audiovisual material with other media drawn from online sources will only work effectively if online media is described in a structured and a semantic manner.

Mobile and tablet devices, as well as connected TVs, introduce novel application domains that will benefit from broad understanding and acceptance of Linked Media standards. At next weeks World Wide Web Conference (WWW2013), the first ever Workshop on Linked Media (LiME) will take place. As keynote, LinkedTV scientific coordinator Lyndon Nixon will provide an overview of current practices and specification efforts in the domain of video and Web content integration, drawing from the LinkedTV and MediaMixer projects. From this, a vision for a Linked Media layer on the future Web emerges, to which LinkedTV as a project is contributing. During the workshop, which also features seven scientific presentations around Linked Media themes, interactive and open discussion will be encouraged to explore the Linked Media goal and how to get there.

WWW2013 attendees are cordially invited in their registration to also plan to attend the Linked Media workshop on the Monday (1-5pm), and we look forward to seeing you there!

MediaMixer is pleased to announce a Call for Multimedia Grand Challenge Solutions: Participate in the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Temporal Segmentation and Annotation Grand Challenge, and win a trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia!

to be held at ACM Multimedia 2013, Barcelona, Spain, October 21-25, 2013

offical Grand Challenge page:
http://acmmm13.org/submissions/call-for-multimedia-grand-challenge-solutions/mediamixervideolectures-net-grand-challenge/

CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION
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VideoLectures.NET mostly hosts lectures 1 to 1.5h long linked with slides and enriched with metadata and additional textual contents. With automatic temporal segmentation and annotation of the video we would gain on efficiency of our video search engine and be able to provide users with the ability to search for sections within a video, as well as recommend similar content. This would mean that the challenge participants develop tools for automatic segmentation of videos that could then be implemented in VideoLectures.NET.

The criteria for the evaluation of the proposed solutions to this challenge include the quality of the segmentation and the annotations, the duration of the required processing in time, and the ease of integration of the proposed solutions into VideoLectures.NET.

A dataset of Videos from VideoLectures.NET will be provided. Participants are also free to use additional datasets for testing their approaches, in addition to the videos provided by the Challenge organizers.

SUBMISSIONS AND PUBLICATION OF RESULTS
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Submissions should depict working, presentable systems or demos, using the provided grand challenge dataset, and should describe why the system presents a novel and interesting solution.

The submissions (max 4 pages) should be formatted according to ACM Multimedia formatting guidelines. Multimedia Grand Challenge reviewing is Double-blind so authors shouldn’t reveal their identity in the paper. The finalists will be selected by a committee consisting of academia and industry representatives, based on novelty, presentation, scientific interest of the approach and performance against the task.

Finalist submissions will be published in the conference proceedings, and will be presented in a special event during the ACM Multimedia 2013 conference in Barcelona, Spain. At the conference, finalists will be requested to introduce their solutions, give a quick demo, and take questions from the judges and the audience. Winners will be selected for Multimedia Grand Challenge awards based on their presentation. An additional prize (sponsored by Technicolor) will be awarded to the most innovative multimodal solution, and a special MediaMixer prize will be awarded to the best solution presented for the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Challenge.

IMPORTANT DATES
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Challenge Dataset: Already available!
Paper Submission Deadline: July 1, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: July 29, 2013
Camera-Ready Submission Deadline: August 12, 2013

SUBMIT AND WIN A TRIP TO LJUBLJANA
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MediaMixer is pleased to sponsor a prize for the Grand Challenge. The best solution – as determined by the evaluation criteria and subject to final decision by the challenge organizers – wins the submitting author(s) a trip to beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia!

The winners are invited to visit the offices of VideoLecture.NET, meet the team over lunch and discuss how their solution may be integrated into the next release of the video portal. The rest of their stay they are free to explore Slovenia’s capital city.

The prize is reimbursement of flight and hotel costs for up to *2* persons (at least one of whom MUST be a named author of the winning paper) to Ljubljana, Slovenia. The flight taken must be in economy class and the hotel stay no more than 2 nights, and a maximum reimbursement amount of 1000€ can be claimed, subject to the provision of original receipts.

INTERESTED?
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The first step is to contact us, we will answer any questions you have and most importantly we can give you access to the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Challenge dataset.
Tanja Zdolsek, tanja.zdolsek AT ijs.si
Vasileios Mezaris, bmezaris AT iti.gr

The next European conference on Interactive Television (EuroITV) to be held June 24-26 2013 in Como, Italy, promises to be as every year a highlight for researchers and industry experts working in the domain of Smart and Interactive Television. This year the LinkedTV project will be particularly present with several project partners presenting papers or demos, as well as the 4th edition of the Future Television workshop taking place on the pre-conference day.

In the main conference, LinkedTV is pleased to announce that the following demos and short papers have been accepted in the program:

1. Daniel Ockeloen,Kati Hyyppä, Pieter van Leeuwen. Enriched Multiscreen TV Experience. Demo
2. Ana Carina Palumbo, Lynda Hardman. User Information Needs for Environmental Opinion-forming and Decision-making in Link-enriched Video. Short Paper
3. Vuk Milicic, José Luis Redondo Garcia, Giuseppe Rizzo, Raphaël Troncy. Grab your Favorite Video Fragment: Interact with a Kinect and Discover Enriched Hypervideo. Demo
4. Lyndon Nixon, Matthias Bauer and Cristian Bara. Connected Media Experiences: interactive video on your television. Demo

Clearly LinkedTV is working to put hypervideo (video where a viewer can interact with objects within the video) onto the research and industry agenda, with single and multi-screen demos, interaction using the remote control, touch and gesture, and the interface and experience being backed by user trials. We look forward to meeting with EuroITV attendees – for the interested, please note that early registration at EuroITV is available until May 1st!

MediaMixer partner JSI is pleased to announce a special workshop on “Advanced Methods and Tools for Web-based Education” one day before the main OCWC Global Conference 2013. OCWC – the Open CourseWare Consortium - is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide. The workshop will permit conference attendees to learn about, among others, technologies for granular level media fragment re-purposing and re-mixing that may be pertinent to setting up an e-learning or open education project.

 

The EXPERIMEDIA project will be at the Future Internet Assembly in Dublin, May 8-10th. We have a large booth in the Hands on FIRE exhibition shared with the related projects 3D-LIVE and STEER. We are also running a session on Linking user populations to novel networks in Future Internet research programmes on Thursday. With our second Open Call coming up it is a great opportunity to come and talk to us about getting your ideas funded.MEDIAConnect Demonstration The MEDIAConnect experiment is finding out whether people find Augmented Reality displays useful for accessing information. MEDIAConnect is deployed in Schladming, the Austrian ski resort that recently hosted the FIS World Ski Championship 2013. The experiment is investigating the Quality of Experience for tourists using a mobile augmented reality application. By pointing their tablet or phone at large panorama posters of the ski slopes located at the ski lifts they can view additional dynamic content such as weather conditions, ski lift states (open or closed) and photos of points of interest. This application aims to allow skiers to better plan their day of skiing and spot new areas of interest whilst at the ski station. See for yourself: come and try MEDIAConnect at our stand. Weightlifting Demonstration Become a Future Internet Athlete!  Can you lift the weights better than an Olympian?When lifting our (very light) weights you will be tracked in 3D and given a score for the leader board which is then Tweeted for your friends to enjoy. Meanwhile the score, Quality of Service data from the 3D tracking, your emotional feedback and analysis of social network activity is all fed into the Experiment Content Component database to help an experimenter understand the usage and impact of the system. This is a fun extension of an experiment being undertaken at CAR, the high-performance athletics training facility in Barcelona. Instant feedback is provided to the athletes and coach regarding the speed, position and balance of a lift and we may also investigate the pros and cons of sharing training performance data online with an athlete’s social circle. Come and see if you are the best and learn about experimentation in EXPERIMEDIA.Linking user populations to novel networks in Future Internet research programmes As one of the FIA working sessions on Thursday, we will be leading a discussion on how we can engage users in Future Internet research and experimentation. Using case studies from EXPERIMEDIA, STEER, 3D-LIVE and FI-CONTENT we will explore the following questions: What approaches exist and what is applicable in what situation? How does user participation change at different phases of the RTD lifecycle? How can we scale user participation from trials to industrialization and what does this mean for qualitative and quantitative assessment? How is user participation being addressed in the FIRE and FI-PPP programmes and what can be done to improve it?

VideoLectures.Net and the MediaMixer project have launched a challenge at the 21st ACM International Conference on Multimedia. This requires participants to develop tools for automatic segmentation of videos that could then be implemented in the video library. For more information and submission guidelines visit the official website. The finalists will be published in the proceedings and presented in a special event during the conference in Barcelona.

Call for participation now published

VideoLectures.NET mostly hosts lectures 1 to 1.5h long linked with slides and enriched with metadata and additional textual contents. With automatic temporal segmentation and annotation of the video we would gain on efficiency of our video search engine and be able to provide users with the ability to search for sections within a video, as well as recommend similar content. This would mean that the challenge participants develop tools for automatic segmentation of videos that could then be implemented in VideoLectures.NET.

Evaluation

There will be 3 criteria for evaluation:

1. The quality of segmentation and annotation. The key criteria for evaluation will be the quality of the segmentations and annotations* that are extracted from a particular video. Goal: most clearly separated and detailed automatic description of why a segment is a new segment. For the annotations of the segments we do not have a specified vocabulary. Participants should annotate the segments with descriptive labels that allow us to differentiate between various segments and retrieve subsets of them, e.g. using labels of actions (presentation, Q&A, etc.) or also labels based on presentation (sub-)topics.

2. Service effectiveness. How to increase the searchability of the content (when searching for specific content using a search engine, or while browsing)? Goal: quality of annotations used for searching; duration of the processing in time; amount of processed data.

3. Efficiency of the underlying algorithm. Goal: ease of integration, processing speed.

Dataset

Videos will be provided. Participants are also free to use additional datasets for testing their approaches, in addition to the videos provided by the Challenge organizers.

Contacts

Tanja Zdolšek tanja.zdolsek -at- ijs.si   Vasilis Mezaris bmezaris -at- iti.gr

LinkedTV is pleased to announce a special session on Social Events in Web Multimedia taking place during the International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval ICMR 2013, on April 18th 2013. Project partners CERTH and EURECOM are responsible for organizing this session in which the latest research on video analysis, annotation and enrichment where it relates to mining the Web for media related to a specific event will be presented. See http://www.icmr2013.org/sessions.php for the session description and http://impact.utc.edu/icmr2013/program.php for its place in the conference program.

Final chance to participate at the 1st summer school on Media Fragment Creation and Remixing (SMMIX’13) as the registration deadline has been extended for just one time until APRIL 14.

The summer school aims at offering participants from all over the world– both PhD/MSc students and young researchers– top level education in the emerging area of media fragment technologies and applications (including topics such as video analysis, video annotation, semantic multimedia, social media, digital rights and multimedia applications). It will combine delivering in-depth lectures with giving to its participants the possibility for gaining hands-on experience on the use of media fragment annotation and re-use technologies, and of the effectiveness, privacy etc. issues that may arise. Summer school participants are encouraged to bring a poster describing their research work. They will have the chance to present this during the poster session and get feedback from fellow students and summer school’ lecturers.

For further information and for applying, please visit: http://summerschool.mediamixer.eu/

The annual MediaEval initiative is a benchmarking event dedicated to evaluating new algorithms for multimedia access and retrieval. Each year a set of multimedia tasks are defined and an open call is made for participants to evaluate their approaches over a test data set. Participants have the opportunity to compare work and establish means to gain improvements in media analysis algorithms tuned to specific tasks.

LinkedTV relies on specifically prepared media analysis approaches to be able to effectively and efficiently identify concepts, events, objects and salient features in audiovisual content from various domains, including news and cultural heritage. Hence it is to be expected that the project is involving itself directly in MediaEval 2013, where partners are co-organising two of the primary tasks:

• The Social Event Detection (SED) task of MediaEval 2013 requires participants to discover social events and organize the related media items in event-specific clusters, within a collection of Web multimedia. Event detection in audiovisual media is an important contribution to LinkedTV annotation, to enable systems to go beyond individual objects and concepts in a video to a conceptual description capturing a distinct activity or happening (“Angela Merkel meeting with Barack Obama at the White House”).
• The Search and Hyperlinking task of MediaEval 2013 opens the chance for contributions to media hyperlinking from the wider research community. Using around 200 hours of archive BBC video, participants must demonstrate answering a query with a ranked list of media items, and generating a ranked list of video segments in the same collection that provide information about these anchors. The (automated) interlinking of video material in a collection is an open research task, and LinkedTV will participate directly in this task using linking approaches developed in the project for the linking video to Web contentwork.

Registration to participate in both tasks is now open!

The first International Workshop on Linked Media to be held at the WWW2013 conference this year organized by LinkedTV has just announced its agenda.

The event forms part of a LinkedTV effort to push for more structured, interlinked annotation of online media resources, which would not only support the hyperlinking task in LinkedTV but would surely support the creation of other, innovative media applications.

Scientific coordinator Lyndon Nixon will keynote on the importance of Linked Media to the future Web, something LinkedTV as a project is supporting together with the MediaMixer project which promotes semantic media and media fragments to industry.

An agenda of scientific talks and demos will show some of the work being done today around the world in supporting Linked Media, and we are looking forward to a wider participation by interested researchers and industry professionals to join the Linked Media discussion. In fact, WWW2013 early registration finishes today.

See the agenda at http://www.linkedtv.eu/event/lime2013/ 

TV and the Web is already converging, both on the single screen of SmartTVs and across devices as mobile apps sync with TV programming and offer new functionalities like social network chatter or related news and information. Our 4th workshop on Future TV at the EuroITV Conference, Como, Italy, June 24-26 2013, is looking for insightful submissions of visions of future TV and Web interaction on the same screen and across different screens.

If you’re interested, the good news is the submission deadline was just extended, so now you have until April 7 to prepare a short paper, long paper or demo about your work!

For more information about the workshop and the submission procedure, please browse to http://www.linkedtv.eu/event/futuretv2013/ 

We are pleased to announce that applications are NOW open for the 1st Summer School on Media Fragment Creation and Remixing in Chania, Crete, Greece on June 3-6, 2013. Places are limited, so secure your place today!

The summer school aims at offering participants from all over the world – both PhD/MSc students or young researchers, and media professionals / practitioners – top level education in the emerging area of media fragment technologies and applications (including topics such as video analysis, video annotation, semantic multimedia, social media, digital rights and multimedia applications). It will combine delivering in-depth lectures with giving to its participants the possibility for gaining hands-on experience on the use of media fragment annotation and re-use technologies, and of the effectiveness, privacy etc. issues that may arise. The school will be organized in two tracks, one for academia members (PhD/MSc students or young researchers) and one for industry professionals.

Application Deadline: 31 March 2013

For further information and for applying, please visit this link!

LinkedTV is pleased to announce the fourth International Workshop on FutureTV will take place at this year’s EuroITV conference in Como, Italy on June 24, 2013.

This years topic is “linking television and Web across screens”. Given the current trends towards using complementary devices for Web-TV integration, we want to examine in this workshop how the use of more than one screen, combined with various interaction and sensor possibilities (touch, gesture, speech, movement), could contribute new ideas and more intuitive usage possibilities for the future vision of “Linked Television”, television where Web and TV content are seamlessly interlinked.

We want to hear about your research and development work in Linked Television, particularly but not exclusively where it is cross-device, cross-platform and cross-screen!

Submission deadline is March 22. For more information, see http://www.linkedtv.eu/event/futuretv2013/

 

Calling all researchers and scientists working on topics related to media fragment creation, specification, description, rights management and re-use.. the 1st International Workshop on Media Fragment Creation and Remixing (MMIX’13) takes place under MediaMixer partner organisation during the ICME 2013 in San Jose, California from July 15 to 19, 2013.

Be among the first to connect with MediaMixer in the state of the art in media fragment research, submit your paper now! Deadline has been extended until March 14, 2013.

For more information about the workshop and how to submit, see http://mediamixer.eu/event/mmix2013/

LinkedTV is pleased to announce, following several requests, that the submission deadline for the 1st WWW workshop on Linked Media (LiME-2013) has been extended until March 1st 2013, 23:59 Hawaii time.

This 1st world wide web workshop on Linked Media (LiME-2013) aims at promoting the principles of Linked Media on the Web by gathering media owner stakeholders and semantic media researchers to exchange current research and development work on online media description creation, publication, and processing. Specifically, we aim to promote a platform where automatic multimedia analysis results can be integrated into online media descriptions, making media more easily shared, queried and re-used. This will offer a wide range of possibilities for various stakeholders in the creative industries. We foresee an opportunity to build a core consensus on Linked Media technology and launch Linked Media for the Web, at the WWW2013 conference. We see WWW as an outstanding opportunity to kick-start collaboration on this emerging field of research.

Don’t miss the opportunity to be part of this, see http://www.linkedtv.eu/event/LiME2013/ for full workshop details!