1,000 words abstract now due July 7, 2008 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Multimedia Content Access: Algorithms and Systems III (EI121) Part of the IS&T/SPIE 21st Annual Symposium on Electronic Imaging 2009 18-22 January 2009 • San Jose Convention Center • San Jose, CA USA http://spie.org//app/program/index.cfm?fuseaction=conferencedetail&export_id=x16280&ID=x16223&redir=x16223.xml&conference_id=863847&event_id=862795&programtrack_id=862801 Conference Chairs: Raimondo Schettini, Univ. degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca (Italy); Ramesh C. Jain, Univ. of California/Irvine; Simone Santini, Univ. Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) Conference Cochairs: Alan Hanjalic, Technische Univ. Delft (Netherlands); Nicu Sebe, Univ. van Amsterdam (Netherlands); Edward Y. Chang, Google, Inc. (Taiwan); Theo Gevers, Univ. van Amsterdam (Netherlands) Important dates: Extended Abstract (1,000 words) Due: 7 Luly 2008 Manuscript Due: 27 October 2008 Final Summary (200 words) Due: 17 November 2008 Modern computer technology has brought multimedia to the limelight as a new communication form, quite possibly the first original communication form of the computer age. Today, "being multimedia" is a real possibility for almost any computer user, and the communicative possibilities aspects of human/machine systems that will ensue from this fact will have an impact in a wide range of fields. To benefit from this potential, developers need reliable techniques for the analysis, search, and management of multimedia data, as well as distributed system architectures in which these techniques can be embedded to effectively help the users. The purpose of this conference is to create an international forum to address the research challenges and opportunities of multimedia content analysis, management and retrieval. We are soliciting high quality submissions to present new and daring ideas, question established paradigms and unwritten rules, and introduce new and original research directions in the following (and related) areas: Content Analysis: * image, audio and video characterization (feature extraction) * fusion of text, image, video and audio data * content parsing, clustering and classification * semantic modeling * image, video and audio similarity measures * object and event detection and recognition * content analysis methods and algorithms * benchmarking of content analysis methods and algorithms * affective content analysis * image and video quality assessment Content Management and Delivery: * multimedia databases * multimedia standards * peer-to-peer storage and search techniques * indexing and data organization * system optimization for search and retrieval * storage hierarchies, scalable storage * personalized content delivery Content Search/browsing/retrieval: * multimedia data mining * active learning and relevance feedback * query models * browsing and visualization * search issues in distributed and heterogeneous systems * benchmarking search, browsing, and retrieval algorithms and systems * generation of video summaries and abstracts * cognitive aspects of human/machine systems Internet Imaging and Multimedia: * peer-to-peer imaging systems for the internet * content creation and presentation for the internet * web cameras: impact on content analysis techniques * interactive multimedia creation for the internet * content rating, authentication, non-repudiation, and cultural differences in content perception * web crawling, caching, and security * multimedia on the semantic web * user interfaces * mobile visual information processing and management Applications: * commerce * medicine * news * entertainment * geovisualization * wearable and ubiquitous computing * management of meetings * biometrics * cultural heritage and education * collaborative systems and multi-device * security * gestural information systems. The conference program will include invited keynote speakers, invited special sessions, and a panel of experts who will be discussing the research challenges related to multimedia content analysis, management and retrieval.