An interview with Prof. Alan Smeaton

Please describe your journey into computing from your youth up to the present. What foundational lessons did you learn from this journey? Why were you initially attracted to multimedia? I started a University course in Physics and Mathematics and in order to make up my credits I needed to add … Read more

How Do Ideas Flow around SIGMM Conferences?

  The ACM Multimedia conference just celebrated its quarter century in October 2017. This is a great opportunity to reflect on the intellectual influence of the conference, and the SIGMM community in general. The progress on big scholarly data allows us to make this task analytical. I download a data … Read more

JPEG Column: 77th JPEG Meeting in Macau, China

JPEG XS is now entering the final phases of the standard definition and soon will be available. It is important to clarify the change on the typical JPEG approach, as this is the first JPEG image compression standard that is not developed only targeting the best compression performance for the best … Read more

MPEG Column: 120th MPEG Meeting in Macau, China

The original blog post can be found at the Bitmovin Techblog and has been updated here to focus on and highlight research aspects. The MPEG press release comprises the following topics: Point Cloud Compression – MPEG evaluates responses to call for proposal and kicks off its technical work The omnidirectional media format (OMAF) has … Read more

The Deep Learning Indaba Report

Given the focus on deep learning and machine learning, there is a need to address this problem of low participation of Africans in data science and artificial intelligence. The Deep Learning Indaba was thus born to stimulate the participation of Africans within the research and innovation landscape surrounding deep learning and machine learning. This column reports on the Deep Learning Indaba event, which consisted of a 5-day series of introductory lectures on Deep Learning, held from 10-15 September 2017, coupled with tutorial sessions where participants gained practical experience with deep learning software packages. The column also includes interviews with some of the organisers to learn more about the origin and future plans of the Deep Learning Indaba. Read more

Multidisciplinary Column: Inclusion at conferences, my ISMIR experiences

In 2009, I attended my very first international conference. At that time, I recently had graduated for my Master’s degree in Computer Science, and just was starting the road towards a PhD; in parallel, I had also started pursuing my Master’s degree in Piano Performance at the conservatoire. As a … Read more

Diversity and Credibility for Social Images and Image Retrieval

Social media has established itself as an inextricable component of today’s society. Images make up a large proportion of items shared on social media [1]. The popularity of social image sharing has contributed to the popularity of the Retrieving Diverse Social Images task at the MediaEval Benchmarking Initiative for Multimedia Evaluationa [2]. Since … Read more

PhD Thesis Summary

Sang-hyo Park

In video coding, motion estimation (ME) that predicts a block among temporally correlated frames has had a crucial impact on not only the compression efficiency, but also the computational complexity. Particularly, fast ME algorithms has been a pivot in much research that attempts to reduce the complexity of video encoder … Read more

Free or Open Source Item

Content-based Multimedia Retrieval using vitrivr

vitrivr is an open source retrieval system capable of processing multimedia documents such as images, videos, music, and 3D-models. It supports a wealth of content based features for multiple modalities and comes with a ready-to-use Docker image and user interface. We focus on the vitrivr stack in its second version, … Read more