Back in June, I gave a talk at the Communication Science Department here at Radboud University Nijmegen. Today, I presented a version of that talk to my colleagues in the Language and Speech Technology Research Meeting. The abstract is below together with the slides, which are on SlideShare. During the discussion it became clear that many problems in natural language processing and information retrieval face the issue of human interpretations. It is important to find ways to move forward, although it may not be possible to pack our challenges into neat classification or ranking problems with a single set of consensus ground truth labels. A way forward, is to look to other disciplines for theory of how people understand and use media, and let these inform what we design our systems to do and the ways that we measure success.
Within computer science, "Multimedia" is a field of research that investigates how computers can support people in communication, information finding, and knowledge/opinion building. Multimedia content is defined broadly. It includes not only video, but also images accompanied by text and other information (for example, a geo-location). It can be professionally produced, or generated by users for online sharing. Computer scientists historically have a “love-hate” relationship with multimedia. They “love” it because of the richness of the data sources and the wealth of available data, which leads to interesting problems to tackle with machine learning. They “hate” it because multimedia is a diffuse and moving target: the interpretation of multimedia differs from person to person, and changes over time in the course of its use as a communication medium. This talk gives a view onto ongoing research in the area of multimedia information retrieval algorithms, which help people find multimedia. We look at a series of topics that reveal how pattern recognition, text processing, and crowdsourcing tools are used in multimedia research, and discuss both their limitations and their potential.
Showing posts with label MIR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MIR. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Friday, March 29, 2013
Multimedia Bits
Cynthia Liem recently gave a TedX Delft talk called "Every bit of it". I have the pleasure and the honor of being her colleague at the Delft Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab. I missed being at the talk in person, but finally found time today to watch it on YouTube.
What she is saying is so critical---it at the same time both fresh and timeless---that the talk deserves a more in-depth reaction than a tweet or re-tweet. This post summarizes the message that I heard in Cynthia's talk.
Cynthia makes the point that every bit on the Internet has meaning to the original person who put it there. These are of course, multimedia bits, that she is speaking of videos and images that have been captured by people and shared on the Internet. An important question in this era of Big Data: each of these "bits" of multimedia is captured by someone for some reason. Cynthia tells us that we can add worth to these bits by enhancing them with other bits; in particular, she shows us wondrous transformations that can be brought about by adding music to video.
Towards the end of the video, she says that a big question that with face with multimedia is "What is relevant?" http://youtu.be/ykkXdjr0rfI?t=14m1s
She points out that we tend to focus for the obvious in our understanding of relevance, e.g., popularity and quality, and that because of this focus, we miss material that people do not know exists.
Instead, the "bits" of multimedia on the Internet should be seen as an entrance to the world, not as the final product, but a place to start. A diamond in the rough that needs to be polished in order to add value.
At the end of the video, she asks the audience to keep their eyes open for a rediscovered hidden gem....I discuss my gem in my next post: http://ngrams.blogspot.nl/2013/03/multimedia-readymades.html
What she is saying is so critical---it at the same time both fresh and timeless---that the talk deserves a more in-depth reaction than a tweet or re-tweet. This post summarizes the message that I heard in Cynthia's talk.
Cynthia makes the point that every bit on the Internet has meaning to the original person who put it there. These are of course, multimedia bits, that she is speaking of videos and images that have been captured by people and shared on the Internet. An important question in this era of Big Data: each of these "bits" of multimedia is captured by someone for some reason. Cynthia tells us that we can add worth to these bits by enhancing them with other bits; in particular, she shows us wondrous transformations that can be brought about by adding music to video.
Towards the end of the video, she says that a big question that with face with multimedia is "What is relevant?" http://youtu.be/ykkXdjr0rfI?t=14m1s
She points out that we tend to focus for the obvious in our understanding of relevance, e.g., popularity and quality, and that because of this focus, we miss material that people do not know exists.
Instead, the "bits" of multimedia on the Internet should be seen as an entrance to the world, not as the final product, but a place to start. A diamond in the rough that needs to be polished in order to add value.
At the end of the video, she asks the audience to keep their eyes open for a rediscovered hidden gem....I discuss my gem in my next post: http://ngrams.blogspot.nl/2013/03/multimedia-readymades.html
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