ACM SIGIR'98 Post-Conference Workshop 

                  MULTIMEDIA INDEXING AND RETRIEVAL

                Melbourne, Australia, August 28, 1998

                  Call for Participation

 Background:

 This workshop will focus on the required functionality, techniques, and
 evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems.
 Researchers have been investigating content-based retrieval from
 non-text sources such as images, audio and video.  Initially, the focus
 of these efforts were on content analysis and retrieval techniques
 tailored to a specific media; more recently, researchers have started to
 combine attributes from various media.  The goal of multimedia IR
 systems is to handle general queries such as "find outdoor pictures or
 video of Clinton and Gore discussing environmental issues".  Answering
 such queries requires intelligent exploitation of both text/speech and
 visual content.  Multimedia IR is a very broad area covering both
 infrastructure issues (e.g.  efficient storage criteria, networking,
 client-server models) and intelligent content analysis and retrieval.
 Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen three focus areas in
 the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. 

 About the Workshop:

 The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from
 various media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large,
 diverse databases.  An example of such a collection would be the WWW.
 In such cases, a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries,
 each involving a different indexing scheme.  The interaction of various
 media sources that occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying
 pictures, audio accompanying video) is of special interest; such
 interaction can be exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval
 phases. 

 The second focus deals with examples of research using content and
 organization of multimedia information into semantic classes.  Users
 pose and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In
 practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode
 semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is
 extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the
 last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content
 can be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity
 to retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear
 that retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily
 cannot provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a
 search for a red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database
 cannot be expected to yeild meaningful results. On the other hand
 retrieval of red flowers in a database of flowers can be achieved using
 color. In context therefore, examples of research using content and
 organization of multimedia information into semantic classes will be
 discussed. 

 Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example
 picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be
 required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example
 image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of
 generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer
 vision techniques to generate such queries? Or can multimodal retrieval
 techniques be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and
 audio retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic
 queries for realistic systems. 

 The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for
 multimedia retrieval.  Currently, most researchers are using the
 standard evaluation measures defined for text documents; these need to
 be extended/modified for multimedia documents.  There is also a high
 degree of subjectivity involved that needs to be addressed. 

 We will focus on the following specific topics:
 - content analysis and retrieval from various media 
    (text, images, video, audio)
 - interaction of modalities (e.g. text, images) in indexing, retrieval 
 - effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.)
 - evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have 
   found that researchers pay insufficient attention to it.
 - techniques for relevance ranking
 - multimodal query formation/decomposition
 - logic formalisms for multimodal queries 
 - indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g extracting text 
   from images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for 
   both handwritten and printed documents.
 - testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to
    have some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming
    up with a good query set are difficult

 Participation:

 Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a
 presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in
 online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address
 given below.  The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including
 figures, tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but
 not presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to
 exceed 500 words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the
 workshop reflect their research interest. These will be used to select
 panelists.  Both types of submissions are due on Friday, June 5th.
 Decisions will be made no later than Friday, June 26th. In the case of
 paper submission, the final camera-ready papers are due on July 24th.
 Working notes will be made available to all participants at the
 workshop.  All the submissions should be sent to:

 Prof. Rohini K. Srihari,
 CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo
 UB Commons
 520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202
 Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
 rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu

 Organization:

 Workshop Chairs (also program chairs)

 Rohini K. Srihari, SUNY at Buffalo (rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu)
 Zhongfei Zhang, SUNY at Buffalo (zhongfei@cedar.buffalo.edu)
 R. Manmatha, University of Massachussetts (manmatha@cs.umass.edu)
 S. Ravela, University of Massachussetts (ravela@cs.umass.edu)

 Program Committee Members:

 Shih-Fu Chang (Columbia U., USA)
 David Harper (Robert Gordon University, U. K.)
 Alex Hauptmann (CMU, USA)
 Rakesh Kumar (Sarnoff, USA)
 Desai Narasimhalu (ISI, Singapore)
 Candace Sidner (Lotus, USA)
 Peter Schauble (ETH, Switzerland)

 Timetable:

 Paper or statement of interest submission: June 5th, 1998
 Decision: July 3rd, 1998
 Camera-Ready Paper Due: July 24th, 1998
 SIGIR Conference: August 24th - 28th, 1998
 Workshop: August 29th, 1998

 Further Information:

 Further questions may be directed to the address above, or go to the
 Web page of this workshop at http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir98/
 or the SIGIR Conference main Web Page at http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/sigir98/