-------------------------------------------------- Call for Participation MediaEval 2013 Multimedia Benchmark Evaluation http://www.multimediaeval.org Regular registration deadline: 1 May 2013 -------------------------------------------------- MediaEval is a multimedia benchmark evaluation that offers tasks promoting research and innovation in areas related to human and social aspects of multimedia. MediaEval 2013 focuses on aspects of multimedia including and going beyond visual content, such as language, speech, music, and social factors. Participants carry out one or more of the tasks offered and submit runs to be evaluated. They then write up their results and present them at the MediaEval 2013 workshop. For each task, participants receive a task definition, task data and accompanying resources (dependent on task) such as shot boundaries, keyframes, visual features, speech transcripts and social metadata. In order to encourage participants to develop techniques that push forward the state-of-the-art, a "required reading" list of papers will be provided for each task. Participation is open to all interested research groups. Please sign up via http://www.multimediaeval.org (Regular registration will remain open until 1 May.) The following tasks are available to participants at MediaEval 2013: *Social Event Detection for Social Multimedia* This task requires participants to discover social events and organize the related media items in event-specific clusters, within a collection of Web multimedia. Social events are events that are planned by people, attended by people and for which the social multimedia are also captured by people. *Search and Hyperlinking of Television Content* This task requires participants to find video segments relevant to an information need and to provide a list of useful hyperlinks for each of these segments. This year we focus on television data provided by the BBC and real information needs from home users. *Placing: Geo-coordinate Prediction for Social Multimedia* This task requires participants to estimate the geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) of media items (images and videos), as well as predicting how “placeable” a media item actually is. The Placing Task integrates all aspects of multimedia: textual meta-data, audio, image, video, location, time, users and context. *Violent Scenes Detection in Film (Affect Task)* This task requires participants to automatically detect portions of movies depicting violence. Participants are encouraged to deploy multimodal approaches (audio, visual, text) to solve the task. *Visual Privacy: Preserving Privacy in Surveillance Videos* For this task, participants will need to propose methods for obscuring identifying elements on people in videos so that they are rendered unrecognizable in a manner that is perceived as appropriate to human viewers of the footage. *Spoken Web Search: Spoken Term Detection for Low Resource Languages* The task involves searching FOR audio content WITHIN audio content USING an audio content query. This task is particularly interesting for speech researchers in the area of spoken term detection or low-resource speech processing. *(New!) Question Answering for the Spoken Web* The problem that we wish to explore in this task is how best to build an information retrieval system in which both the queries and the content are spoken. The task challenges the research community’s ability to build ranked retrieval systems for matching spoken questions with spoken answers based on topical matching. *(New!) Soundtrack Selection for Commercials (MusiClef Task)* Given a TV commercial, participants are required to predict the most suitable music soundtrack from a list of candidate songs. A multimodal dataset will be provided involving both context- and content-based information, such as audio features, visual features, web pages, social tags and microblog information, related to brands, products, artists and songs. *(New!) Similar Segments of Social Speech* This task involves searching in social multimedia, specifically conversations between students in one academic department. This task is the first exploration of social search in multimedia, and the first social spoken dialog retrieval task not assuming term-based search. *(New!) Retrieving Diverse Social Images* This task requires participants to automatically refine a ranked list of Internet photos using provided visual and textual information. The objective is to select only a compact sub-set of photos that are equally representative matches but also diverse representations of the query. *(New!) Emotion in Music (also an Affect Task)* This task is a new task on emotional characterization of music. Given a set of songs, participants are asked to automatically generate emotional representations. *(New!) Crowdsourcing for Social Multimedia* This task requires participants to create ground truth from raw labels that have been generated by workers on a commercial crowdsourcing platform. Tasks marked "New!" are the 2013 Brave New Tasks. If you sign up for these tasks, please be aware that you will be asked to keep in close touch with the task organizers concerning the details of the task over the course of the benchmarking cycle. We ask for extra-tight communication in order to ensure that these tasks have the flexibility they need to reach their goals. MediaEval 2013 Timeline (dates vary slightly from task to task, see the individual task pages for the individual deadlines: http://www.multimediaeval.org/mediaeval2013) March-May: Registration and return usage agreements. May-June: Release of development/training data. June-July: Release of test data. Mid-Sept.: Participants submit their completed runs. Mid-Sept.-End-Sept.: Evaluation of submitted runs. Participants write their 2-page working notes papers. 18-19 October: MediaEval 2013 Workshop, Barcelona, Spain Please note: The workshop is timed so that it is possible to attend both ACM Multimedia 2013 (http://acmmm13.org/) and the MediaEval 2013 workshop in the same trip. Contact For questions or additional information please contact Martha Larson m.a.larson@tudelft.nl or visit visit http://www.multimediaeval.org MediaEval 2013 Organization Committee: Martha Larson at Delft University of Technology and Gareth Jones at Dublin City University act as the overall coordinators of MediaEval. Individual tasks are coordinated by a group of task organizers, who form the MediaEval Organizing Committee. It is collective efforts of this group of people that makes MediaEval possible. The complete list of MediaEval organizers is at: http://www.multimediaeval.org/who/ A large number of projects make a contribution to MediaEval organization, including (alphabetically): AXES (http://www.axes-project.eu), Chorus+ (http://www.ist-chorus.org), CUbRIK (http://www.cubrikproject.eu/), CNGL (http://www.cngl.ie), Glocal (http://www.glocal-project.eu), LinkedTV (http://www.linkedtv.eu), Media Mixer (http://mediamixer.eu), Mucke (http://www.chistera.eu/projects/mucke), Promise (http://www.promise-noe.eu), Quaero (http://www.quaero.org), Sealinc Media (http://www.commit-nl.nl), SocialSensor (http://www.socialsensor.org), and VideoSense (http://www.videosense.eu).