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