CALL FOR PAPERS: IEEE MULTIMEDIA Special Issue on Bridging the Semantic Gap: Computational Media Aesthetics http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dorai/CFP.html One of the big hurdles facing current media management systems is the semantic gap between the rich meaning that users desire to capture when they query to locate and browse media and the shallowness of the content descriptions that we can actually compute today for media indexing and search. One promising approach at bridging the gap and building high-level semantic descriptions for innovative search and navigation services is founded upon an understanding of media elements and their roles in synthesizing meaning, manipulating perceptions and crafting messages, with a systematic study of media productions. Content creators worldwide use widely accepted conventions and cinematic devices to solve problems presented by the artistic task of transforming a story from a written script to a captivating audiovisual narration. The theme of this special issue is to explore the new area of computational media aesthetics, which we describe as the algorithmic study of a number of visual and aural elements in media and the computational analysis of the principles that have emerged underlying their manipulation in the creative art of clarifying and interpreting some event for an audience. With its underpinning of production knowledge or film grammar, this area enables distilling techniques and criteria to build computational tools that assist in both analyzing and creating digital content. We solicit papers from content creators, producers and computer scientists that seek to address the fundamental issues in spanning the data-meaning gulf by a systematic understanding and application of media production methods. We invite expositions on the principles of media aesthetics and the production rules and conventions that are frequently used in content creation with their interpretive guidance. We seek contributions that address key challenges in bridging the semantic gap, computational frameworks, and tools and techniques to extract expressive elements, higher order semantics and semiotics. The topics, include, but are not limited to: - Challenges of semantic gap in media management systems - Computational frameworks for bridging the semantic gap - Production principles for manipulation of affect and meaning - Semiotics for new media - Expressive elements in movies and video: Representation, extraction, and synthesis - Metrics to assess automatic extraction techniques and representational power of expressive elements - Case studies and working systems Manuscripts due date: June 3, 2002. Authors may submit a pdf or postscript version of the article to magazine assistant Alkenia Winston, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle, Los Alamitos, CA 90720, email awinston@computer.org. Author guidelines are available at http://computer.org/multimedia/author.htm. Important Dates - Deadline for Manuscript Submission: June 3, 2002 - Notification of Acceptance: October 7, 2002 - Final Accepted Manuscripts Due: November 15, 2002 - Publication Date: Spring 2003 Guest Editors for this issue (Authors may contact either guest editor for further information): - Professor Svetha Venkatesh, School of Computing, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, email svetha@cs.curtin.edu.au - Dr Chitra Dorai, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598, email dorai@us.ibm.com