Social Image Popularity Prediction Challenge (ICIP 2020) Call for Papers

Social Image Popularity Prediction Challenge (ICIP 2020)

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Challenge website: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/popularitychallenge/

Main contact: Alessandro Ortis ortis@dmi.unict.it

Brief description/Scope

Social image popularity is a score of the level of engagement achieved
by pictures shared through social media platforms, where the
engagement can be measured in terms of number of views, likes or
shares.

There are several applications that could benefit from the assessment
and the prediction of the level of engagement achieved by a post
shared by a user on a social platform. Application examples are, among
others, social media marketing, brand monitoring, and political
parties’ popularity. The users’ engagement can be measured
considering their activities and interactions with the content
published on the social platform (e.g., comments, likes, views or
shares).

Task description and material

The challenge is meant to develop systems able to predict the
popularity of social images over time (i.e., popularity dynamics),
given the information of the image post available only at posting
time. The task will be addressed by leveraging on the first
large-scale annotated dataset of Flickr image posts monitored for a
period of 30 days since their upload. Given an image post, the output
of the developed predictors will be the temporal sequence of the
predicted 30 engagement values (i.e., number of views).

The dataset consists of ~30K Flickr images labelled with their
engagement scores (i.e., views, comments and favourites) in a period
of 30 days from the upload in the social platform. For each image, the
dataset also includes user's and photo's social features that have
been proven to have an influence on the image popularity on Flickr
(e.g., number of user's contacts, number of user's groups, mean views
of the user's images, photo tags, etc.) recorded at the time of the
image upload.

Test results will be evaluated using the 25% trimmed RMSE (i.e.,
interquartile mean) and the Median RMSE.

The winners will present their solutions at ICIP 2020 and receive a
recognition certificate. The corresponding accepted papers will also
be published in the ICIP 2020 Proceedings. In addition, the authors of
the best selected works will be invited to submit their contribution
to a special issue of a valuable Journal.

Important Dates

    Registration opening: April 15
    Training data available: April 30
    Testing data available: May 30
    Test result submission deadline: June 7
    Announcement of the evaluation results: August 15

Contacts

For any further information, please contact us at ortis@dmi.unict.it and go to the challenge website
https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/popularitychallenge/.


Team that will run the Challenge

Sebastiano Battiato, Full Professor, Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy

Giovanni Maria Farinella, Associate Professor, Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy

Alessandro Ortis, Postdoctoral Researcher, Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy