Special Issue on “Real-life Events in Multimedia: Detection, Representation, Retrieval, and Applications” of the Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) Journal, Springer. Important Dates --------------- *** Submission of papers: 30 June, 2011 *** Acceptance/Revision notification: 30 September 2011 Revised manuscript due: 15 November 2011 Final acceptance notification: 15 January 2012 Final manuscript due: 15 February 2012 Tentative publication: May 2012 Special Issue Description ------------------------- Real-life events are ubiquitous in multimedia. We find them in the multimedia content we all have created and shared or simply have encountered on the Web. For example, images of a concert we recently attended, an interesting location we visited during an overseas trip a long time ago, amateur video footage of a friend’s wedding, official footage of an important game of our favourite football team, or eye- witness descriptions and infrared satellite images of a devastating tornado that made it to the headlines. All this content comes in different types of media (images, videos, text, etc.) using different modalities and was created by different devices under different conditions and with radically different usage in mind. What is common though for all these media items is that they all have captured and convey information about a real-life event. Efficiently and effectively understanding these underlying, heterogeneous real-life events from the multimedia content and using them in order to better organize, share, retrieve and consume the content in any possible way, represents a significant challenge in today’s connected world. This special issue focuses on methods for the event-based processing and organization of multimedia content, with particular emphasis on the detection of real-live events in multimedia, the modeling of such real-life events, the sharing and the event-based retrieval of content, and other novel applications that jointly consider multimedia content and the real-life events that this content represents. We invite the submission of previously unpublished manuscripts describing original work in these and related areas, as detailed below. Topics ------ Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to: O Event Detection and Processing in Multimedia Data --- Recognition of events from large scale, unreliable and/or noisy media data and media streams --- Event clustering towards domain-level events --- Combining low-level events with domain-level events --- Complex-event processing --- Event-stream processing O Event Representation and Event Models --- Modeling of events on domain-level --- Ontology-based representation of events --- Languages for events --- Formal modeling of events, activities, accomplishments, achievements, context, etc. --- Reasoning with events under consideration of causality, uncertainty, similarity, etc. --- Semantic description and annotation for events and event sources O Events in the Context of Web 2.0 --- Collaborative event creation and sharing --- Events in social networks --- Event syndication (e.g., RSS) and attention management O Architectures for Event Management --- Middleware solutions for event management --- Event-driven architectures --- Experimental methodologies --- Domain-specific solutions for event management, such as for emergency response O Applications and Tools --- Event-based applications and tools, including event-based retrieval of multimedia --- Authoring of events --- Events in mobile computing and ubiquitous computing --- Applications that show benefits of using events in practical settings --- User experience, requirements, use cases, and evaluations of event-based applications Paper Submission, Review, and Publication ----------------------------------------- Submissions for this special issue must follow the standard style guidelines of the Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal. Submissions are made through http://www.editorialmanager.com/mtap/ In submitting a manuscript to this special issue, the authors acknowledge that no paper substantially similar in content has been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Guest Editors ------------- Dr. Ansgar Scherp, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany Prof. Ramesh Jain, University of California at Irvine (UCI), USA Prof. Mohan S. Kankanhalli, National University of Singapore, Singapore Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH-ITI), Greece