Call for Paper ACM Multimedia Systems Journal Special Issue on Machine Learning Approaches to Multimedia Information Retrieval Multimedia information retrieval (MIR) deals with the development of effective and efficient indexing and retrieval techniques for multimedia data. The recent explosive growth of the use of multimedia information in many applications requires advanced techniques for multimedia information retrieval. However, it is well-known that research in MIR has been thwarted by the growing semantics gap between the high level semantics expected from human users and the low level features currently used for indexing and retrieval of multimedia information in many existing content based retrieval systems. Recent development in MIR has revealed that machine learning techniques can provide effective solutions to diminish this gap. Consequently, many existing and new research issues in MIR can be effectively tackled by developing novel machine learning techniques. Such techniques can lead to the development of new tools that would substantially improve the retrieval efficiency, effectiveness, and accessibility to multimedia information databases. For example, recent research has demonstrated that machine learning techniques, with relevance feedback, can provide substantial performance improvement for MIR. The objective of this special issue is to address the current challenges and research topics in using machine learning techniques to MIR. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): * Active learning in MIR * Relevance feedback with learning * Incremental learning in MIR * Reinforcement learning in MIR * Selective sampling methods in MIR * Semi-supervised learning in MIR * Similarity measures with learning * Supervised learning in MIR * Unsupervised learning in MIR * User modeling in MIR Authors should follow the ACM Multimedia Systems journal manuscript format described at the journal Website at http://cairo.cs.uiuc.edu/mmsj.html. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy (PDF or Postscript) of their manuscript to the online submission system of the journal Website, according to the following timetable: * Manuscript due: April 15, 2005 * Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2005 * Final manuscript due: October 1, 2005 * Publication date: Spring 2006 The Webpage of this special issue is located at http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~zhongfei/cfp_mmsj_special_issue.html Guest Editors: Prof. Arif Ghafoor School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Purdue University ghafoor@ecn.purdue.edu USA Prof. Zhongfei (Mark) Zhang Computer Science Department Watson School SUNY Binghamton zhongfei@cs.binghamton.edu USA Prof. Michael S. Lew LIACS Media Lab Leiden University mlew@liacs.nl The Netherlands Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou Computer Science Department Nanjing University zhouzh@nju.edu.cn China