************************************************************************** MAED 2014 The 3rd ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for Ecological Data (Regular and Data Challenge workshop) http://maed2014.dieei.unict.it November 7, 2014, Orlando, Florida in association with ACM MM 2014 ************************************************************************** >> PAPER submission: June 30, 2014 << >> Data Challenge registration: April 15, 2014 << ****************************************************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS Digital cameras and sensors are used increasingly in a range of monitoring or exploratory applications, in particular for biological, geological and physical surveys. These technologies have revolutionized our ability to capture multimedia data on large scale for environmental monitoring and are also greatly improving our ability to effectively manage natural resources and increasing our competitiveness. For example, the Xeno-canto project has recorded several thousands of bird sounds from all over the world; the Pl@ntNet project has collected massive plant images for analyzing geographic distribution of plants in the Mediterranean area; the Fish4Knowledge project has recorded many Terabytes of video data for monitoring Taiwanese coral reefs. Despite the recent technology advances has enabled massive data collection, its analysis usually requires very time-consuming and expensive input by human observers. This analytical "bottleneck" greatly restricts the use of these technologies and demands for efficient organization, browsing and retrieval tools to enable proactive provision of analytical information. The automated analysis of such ecology-related multimedia data presents new challenges and the results are of great interest to the general public (e.g. considering mobile-based plant recognition applications for amateurs) as well as to domain experts. Examples of the latter include biologists working on understanding the natural environment, promoting its preservation, and studying the behavior and interactions of the living organisms (insects, animals, etc.) that are part of it. The 3rd ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for Ecological Data features two tracks: 1) Regular Track aiming to present and report on the most recent methods for the management, processing, interpretation, and visualization of multimedia data recorded for monitoring ecological systems, with particular attention to the understanding of the behavior of animals and insects. 2) Data Challenge Track aiming to test image retrieval, computer vision and machine learning methods on a complex and extensive ecological visual dataset, which poses significant challenges in large-scale visual analysis, feature indexing and similarity search. For more details, see http://maed2014.dieei.unict.it/data-challenge-track/ Papers may be submitted to any of the two tracks, and there is no requirement for participating to the data challenge in order to submit a regular paper, and vice versa. Both regular and data challenge submissions will be peer-reviewed and accepted submissions will be included in the workshop proceedings. IMPORTANT DATES REGULAR WORKSHOP -- Deadline for paper submission: June 30, 2014 -- Notification of acceptance: August 7, 2014 -- Deadline for camera ready paper and registration: August 24, 2014 -- October 12, 2012: workshop day DATA CHALLENGE TRACK -- Data Challenge Registration: April 15, 2014 -- Training Data Release: April 21, 2014 -- Test Data Release: May 20, 2014 -- Deadline for run submission: June 30, 2014 -- Notification of acceptance and release of results: August 7, 2014 -- Deadline for camera ready paper and registration: August 24, 2014 SCOPE The topics of interest for the convention include, but are not limited to, the following areas: -- Ecological Multimedia Content Analysis and Processing -- Ecological Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval -- Computer Vision for Ecological Video/Image Processing -- Animals and Insects Behavior and Event Understanding -- Video and Signal Based Surveillance of Ecological Sites -- Participatory and Social Environmental Media Analysis -- Multimedia Systems and Middleware for Ecological Data -- Summarization, browsing and organization of ecological content -- Interfaces, presentation, integration and visualization tools of ecological data -- Methods for ecological content annotation including crowdsourcing solutions -- Semantic Web approaches for ecological data sharing and representation -- Semantic and ontology-driven understanding of ecological data content -- Fine-grained indexing, recognition, classification, categorization and crowdsourced discovery of fine-grained attributes ORGANIZATION * Concetto Spampinato, University of Catania, Italy * Vasileios Mezaris, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas – Greece. * Marco Cristani, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy PROGRAM COMMITTEE Alexander Loos (Fraunhofer IDMT, DE) Alexis Joly (INRIA, FR) Angel Sappa (Computer Vision Center, ES) Antoine Vacavant (Université d’Auvergne Clermont 1, FR) Barbara Caputo (Idiap Research Institute, China) Bas Boom (University of Edinburgh, UK) Benoit Huet (EURECOM, FR) Daniela Giordano (University of Catania, IT) Fei-Fei Li (Stanford University, US) Francesco De Natale (University of Trento, IT) Gabriella Sanniti di Baia (CNR, IT) Harald Bosch (University of Stuttgart, DE) Jenny Benois-Pineau (University of Bordeaux, FR) Kostas Karatzas (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, EL) Leo Wanner (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ES) Loris Bazzani (Dartmouth College,US) Margrit Betke (Boston University, US) Nikolaos Gkalelis (CERTH-ITI, Greece & Imperial College London, UK) Nicu Sebe (University of Trento, IT) Ryan Farrell (Brigham Young University, US) Stefanos Vrochidis (CERTH-ITI, Greece & Queen Mary University, UK) Yuanqing Lin (NEC Labs America, US) Yiannis Kompatsiaris (CERTH-ITI, EL) Victor Lempitsky (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, RU) Vittorio Murino (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, IT) SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Authors are invited to check the MAED 2014 website link http://maed2014.dieei.unict.it/paper-submission/ for details regarding the submission instructions. PROCEEDINGS The Workshop proceedings will be published together with the proceedings of the main conference. Extended and peer-reviewed versions of selected papers will be published in a special issue of a top ranked journal. RESOURCES * MAED 2014 homepage: http://maed2014.dieei.unict.it/ * Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/maed_2014