The MediaEval Workshop: What it's meant to be and why you want to be there.

The MediaEval workshop is the event held each year in the fall at the culmination of the yearly benchmarking cycle. At the time of the MediaEval workshop many things have already happened in the benchmarking year: The task organizers have worked hard to define tasks and issue data sets. Participants have worked hard to develop algorithms that tackle the tasks, and they have run these algorithms on the data sets. The "runs" have been evaluated and each participating team has written their working notes paper. Now it's time for the workshop!

This blog post provides a view (from my perspective as one of the MediaEval co-ordinators) on the history of the workshop and on what the workshop is meant to be. In particular, it highlights the similarities and differences with other types of workshops.

The main goal of the MediaEval workshop is to bring everyone who carried MediaEval tasks together in one physical location to present and discuss their results, exchange experiences and develop ideas for how to improve their algorithms. The first year that we met at a medieval convent, Santa Croce in Fossabanda, it was mostly due to delight in the wordplay between medieval and MediaEval. However, we soon came to appreciate how getting everyone together working, eating and basically living in the same space creates an extremely productive focus on our our common tasks and goals. (Although unlike the nuns of the Middle Ages we don't go dashing off to prayer when we hear the convent bell.)

In 2010, we held the MediaEval workshop just before ACM Multimedia 2010, which was held at the Palazzo dei Congressi in Firenze, Italy. Santa Croce in Fossabanda is located in Pisa, about an hour's train ride from Firenze. We chose the dates and place to cut down on travel time and cost for people who wanted to attend both ACM Multimedia 2010 and the MediaEval 2010 workshop.

The next year, Interspeech 2011 came to the Palazzo dei Congressi in Firenze about the same time of year. MediaEval submitted a proposal and was granted the status of an "Official Satellite Event of Interspeech 2011". Now, instead of just taken advantage of the convenience for travel, we began emphasize hook-up to the topic of the conference: being associated with Interspeech reinforced the use of speech within MediaEval and helped us to better realize the goals expressed in the MediaEval slogan The "multi" in multimedia.

This year, the 12th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2012) will be held in Firenze. This conference provides us with the opportunity to reinforce the use of visual content within MediaEval, another of the multimedia "multi's". The MediaEval 2012 Workshop will be held right before this conference starts, again in Santa Croce in Fossabanda in Pisa. A very close contending idea for the MediaEval 2012 workshop was to hold it near 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2012) in Porto. However, the results of the MediaEval 2012 survey showed that the majority preferred to co-ordinate the date and place with ECCV 2012 and stay for a third year in Pisa.

In sum, the idea of being close to a large conference related to MediaEval topics has grown from being a convenience to being an aspect that strengthens and enriches both the benchmark and the workshop.

What exactly happens at the MediaEval workshop? The workshop consists of a series of sessions on the individual tasks. The task organizers present the task as a whole and each team presents its individual results, after which the floor is opened for discussion. More discussion and exchange occurs during meals and breaks in ad hoc groups. We try to build in a lot of space for discussion into the workshop schedule and especially try to create opportunities for students to discuss with more experienced researchers who help them to guide their efforts along the most effective path.

The proceedings are an important aspect of the workshop. The MediaEval workshop proceedings is a "Working Notes Proceedings" and consists of short (two page) papers written by the participating teams to report their results. These papers describe the algorithms that are used and present the results. They then also seek to understand the algorithm, and participants are requested to report:

• which cases are easy/difficult and why
• which approaches work best and why
• which approaches do not work well

The working notes submissions are reviewed by the task organizers. The task organizers may either accept the submission as is, or may come back to the participant team with a request for revisions of the paper. The preferred mechanism is to have the papers revised rather than to reject them --- sometimes this revision cycle means that the working notes proceedings is not ready until just before the workshop. For this reason, the working notes proceedings is distributed at the workshop on a memory stick.

After the workshop, the working notes is made available online. The 2011 the "Working Notes Proceedings of the MediaEval 2011 Workshop" was published here: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-807/ and in the future we would like to continue to use http://ceur-ws.org/. By publishing in this way, the copyright for the individual papers is with the papers' authors.

MediaEval working notes papers are intended to be first versions of work that is later extended by the authors and submitted to mainstream venues, such as conferences and journals. The fact that the MediaEval workshop proceedings consists of short working notes and that the copyright does stays with the authors keep the proceedings consistent with the goal of reporting an initial research result, which will then be refined and extended using input from the discussion at the MediaEval workshop.

Another important goal of the workshop is to discuss the tasks themselves. Did they help to move the state-of-the-art forward? Should we improve or replace them next year? Are their new questions that need to be answered that require new tasks. Any one attending the workshop is welcome to stand up in the final session and "pitch" an idea for a new task. Tasks which receive good community support in this session have a good chance of receiving the response levels they need on the yearly MediaEval survey to run as tasks in the next year.

Finally, the workshop also aims to connect ourselves and our research to the larger community. We welcome participants from industry who have tasks that they might want to pitch to the community. We also welcome representatives from other benchmarks: MediaEval grows stronger by staying in close contact with groups running benchmarking activities in areas beyond the MediaEval core domain of human and social multimedia. MediaEval 2011 was presented at CLEF 2011, NTCIR 2011 and FIRE 2011 and in 2012 we hope to convince some of our sister benchmarks to give a reciprocal presentation on their own experiences.

As part of staying connected to the larger community, the MediaEval 2011 workshop included a poster and demo session where projects that help to organize MediaEval tasks could present their results and where industry people could make a presentation of new and interesting problems that they would like to make known to the MediaEval community as possible benchmarking tasks.

The workshop closes with a gathering of task organizers and others who have invested time and effort into the community or want to get more closely involved in the future. During this session, we reflect back on what happened so far in the benchmarking year and also discuss the MediaEval related activities that we organize beyond the core benchmarking activities. These include joint papers among all the participants of a task and also special sessions at conferences. Looking forward we also plan to get involved in organizing more workshops (of the traditional variety) at conferences and also think about the possibilities of special issues. Finally, we reflect on our MediaEval goal, To offer the community innovative new tasks related to the human and social aspects of multimedia and our slogan The "multi" in multimedia (it not necessary to be able to say the slogan with a straight face.) On the basis of these reflections, we consider where we would like to go with the benchmark in the coming year.

So why do you want to be at the MediaEval workshop? Well, if you are a task participant, it gives you an opportunity to exchange with other people working on topics similar to yours and helps you to understand and improve the algorithms that you are using to approach your task. MediaEval needs a central group of dedicated researchers to organize the tasks that make the benchmark run. Attending the workshop is a good first step to getting more deeply involved in MediaEval, for example, by proposing a task for the year.

On the MediaEval 2012 survey, we had a question concerning what the community thinks about how MediaEval should grow. I personally, want to keep the workshop as small and intimate as possible. In 2011, we had nearly 60 people and that appeared to me to be a good maximum size for the workshop. However, when I examined the survey results, I realize that I am in the minority here, and that most of the people in the community would like growth. As a result, I am changing my opinion and we will not attempt to artificially restrict growth, as long as it is sustainable.

The issues and ideas around growth is just one area in which the concept of the MediaEval workshop is evolving. One of MediaEval's strengths is that it develops from year to year, guided by the input of the community --- and in particular those people who invest the most hours of their time to make it work. I look forward witnessing and being involved in this development in the 2012 season and, we hope, to seasons beyond.

For further impressions of the MediaEval workshop, check out the MediaEval 2011 workshop video:

Querying the Collective: Why search engines should (responsibly!) support analytics

My thoughts today turned towards the social responsibility of search engines. As search improves, it seems that the question is not moving towards being resolved, but rather is becoming more important. Simply put, as the helpfulness that search engines have in our lives increases, so does their power over us. In this post, I'd like to attempt to unpack that thought a bit and build a case for the importance of social responsibility of search engines.

Let's consider the question of the identity of the entity with which knowledge resides. In other words, let's have a look at, "who knows what" in some basic search scenarios. User information needs, I claim, differ along the who-knows-what dimension:

• Known-item search: "I know what I want and my information need will be fulfilled when I can get my hands on this item." (Knowledge effectively already with me.)
  
• Ad hoc search: "I don't know exactly what I want. But I know that there are other people who know. My information need will be fulfilled when I can get my hands on information sources created by people who do know." (Knowledge with other people, soon to be with me.)

As long as we stick to these two variants, the world is relatively well behaved. Social responsibility arguably remains with the searcher and with the individuals making the information sources available.

However, with the next step in this typology, things definitely become different.

• Analytics search: "I don't know exactly what I want. In fact, I know that there is no individual person who knows. My information need will be fulfilled if I can get my hands on information that is created using analytics over a larger number of information sources." (Knowledge with no one, not yet.)

We do analytics search all the time, even without realizing it. For me, it's often for small things while writing research papers, for example, for finding the more common usage "crowd-sourcing" vs. "crowdsourcing" or to see if "internet" has finally overtaken "Internet". I actually just this moment carried out a search for "analytics", which is being red-underlined as a spelling mistake as I write. In response to my query, Google tells me "About 117,000,000 results (0.24 seconds)". I decide that there are a lot of other people using this word -- many in the same way that I am using it now, so I ignore the spellchecker and move on.

The point is that this 117,000,000 is information that was derived on the spot by analyzing and aggregating a huge number of data sources. As a result, the responsibility for this information has shifted and now lies elsewhere. It is not so clear that it lies only with me, the person asking the question, or with the information sources that are being aggregated. Rather, the responsible for creating this information lies with the algorithm that made the calculation. If we think that a non-human entity such as an algorithm cannot be responsible, then the conclusion must be that the responsibility lies with the people who created and control the algorithm that made the calculation, i.e., the minds and masters behind the search engine.

Of course, many times that responsibility is not a particularly heavy weight and the answers to analytics search queries can often be wildly off and still not be harmful. Give or take a million, I still will see that there are a lot of people using the word "analytics" and that answers my question.

However, I would argue that there are enough cases in which the results of analytics search queries have a large enough impact that they should force us to think carefully about the social responsibility that is borne directly by our search algorithms, their creators and the providers of our search services.

Recently, I spent some time in a house by a lake in the forest. The local news reported an incident in which a hunter reported a man in the forest, carrying a gun, but not wearing the blaze-orange of a hunter. The man had fired at him, and the hunter returned fire. Basically, I made my decision about when to go out of the house after hearing that news report by using a search engine to monitor real-time media (Twitter and local news). My queries were analytics queries because they relied on the entire collection of available information being scanned. My conclusion about the situation relied on a relatively subtle difference between no one mentioning it and it being mentioned by a handful of people (the forest being rather sparsely populated). I continued periodic query sessions, and the story died out relatively quickly. I walked out of the house with confidence that the incident was a fluke and not a rampage and that no one was going to take a pot shot at me.

One could argue that I was irresponsible for potentially putting my safety in the hands of a search engine. But one could also argue that I was irresponsible for being there in the hunting season. There are also those that would claim that the place is a bit weird anyhow, and should be completely avoided. The problem is, that place is where I'm from. I'm probably not about to stop going back and also I'm probably not about to stop looking for information by carrying out analytics search with a search engine.

It seems inevitable: People use analytics search to form opinions and make assessments that influence their behavior and lead them to make important decisions.

We have little choice but to admit that we would like search engines to offer us as users the possibility to satisfy our information needs using analytic search. It gives us a lens to view the world around us. It takes us a step in the direction pointed to recently by Doug Oard, who was quoted on Twitter as wanting an information retrieval system that is an exoskeleton for the mind. Personally, (and to the bemusement of my colleagues) I tend to talk about search, especially in the context of social networks, as providing us with a prosthesis. In the end, all the metaphors boil down to analytics search being just plain important to us and to what we want to do in our lives.

We are left with the conclusion: Search engines should support analytics search, but they should take careful regard of social responsibility.

Why am I thinking of analytics search today? Probably because I've come up against another problem where it is useful. This problem involves no guns, so it's not particularly life threatening -- at the most it threatens the productivity of our lab.

At the beginning of the year, there was a high-level decision to restrict access to our building on the weekends. The cited reasons were that ICT technology no longer requires 24-hour building access and that weekend closure would save energy and security costs. The net result has been that on the weekends our lab is completely empty, when there used to be at least one or two PhD students working there, when I'd go in.

I became curious about exactly how much electricity is being saved and realized that we can actually make a rough estimate using social media to calculate the number of weekends in which the building is actually powered down. For example, today (a Saturday) it wasn't. Today, I took a picture (above) in the cafeteria which reveals the fact that it wasn't. There were also other people in this group in the picture that were themselves taking pictures. If a search engine will allow me to find other pictures (e.g., on Flickr) of weekend events in the building, it will be possible to make an estimate the total number of days of electrical consumption actually saved by keeping the PhD students out of the lab.

None of the individual picture takers know this information, but if the information can be aggregated with the support of a search, then we can know -- calling the information into being, as it were, using a couple of queries linked to dates and locations. I'll leave it to another day to examine the question of if I actually have a right to know how much energy is being saved by the building closure policy. Here, I draw a different conclusion: if I am going to rely on a search engine to formulate an impression of what happens in the building on the weekends, then I would like that search engine to have assumed the responsibility of giving the best answer it possibly can.

BBC Don't Make Me Evil: We need fragment level access to online spoken audio content

Today, I uploaded something to YouTube I strictly speaking probably should not have. It was a section from a BBC podcast Outriders containing an interview with Heather Marsh about connecting and protecting people by creating social networks from the bottom up rather than from the top down, so that the power and control remains with the individual and not with with an overarching central authority.

In particular, she discusses working with Tribler the open source peer-to-peer client at TU Delft. At 4 minutes and 28 seconds into the interview she states, "It's what we always wanted, it's what the Internet always was supposed to be and we're at the point now where there is no excuse not to have it."

C'mon BBC, there's no way that I am not going to take that sound byte and spread it through my social network. I just don't have that kind of will power. But are you allowing me to do this?

No. The podcast is one monolithic .mp3 file. The times at which the individual interviews (there are three on three different subjects) begin are not given. There is simply no easy fragment level access possible.

And here's where my self control breaks down. I excerpt the interview from the mp3 and upload the thing to YouTube. Twinged by guilt, I generate myself a neat deep link. (As I mentioned in my previous post that touched on deep links as used by YouTube, a deep link is a link that let you jump in to a particular point in an audio file.)

Voila, here is my link for the "there's no excuse not to have Tribler" sound byte:

(except my conscious got the better of me and I deleted it)

Most people I know are so much more likely to click on a deep link then to struggle with the podcast download at:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/pods/pods_20120221-0400a.mp3

Of course with the download it's still Tweetable:

TU Delft P2P client Tribler as heard on BBC Radio 5 "It's what we always wanted" Listen in at 4'28''
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/pods/pods_20120221-0400a.mp3

Twitter's link shortening would get that down to 140 characters. But then I have to trust my followers are willing to devote about 10 times more attention to digesting my Tweet, then to other Tweets containing links to streams not downloads.

Not only can I not easily link to my sound byte, I also have no way of finding this reference to Tribler unless I already know this is there, occurring in the middle of an interview. There is no indication of the names of the interviewees and give only very limited information on the topic.

And to aid findability, of course, I turn on the YouTube automatic captioning and see what kind of text transcript the speech recognition will generate.

It's just a click on the little cc icon on the bottom and the transcripts are displayed. You can use the player bar to move quickly through the video and the changing transcript sort of gives you an idea of what the different parts of the interview about. You won't be blown away by the quality of the transcripts, "Tribler" for example is not correctly recognized. Nonetheless you can use them to figure out where to stop, and how to navigate to listen to particular questions.

In short, this workaround instantiates the principle of the intelligent multimedia player. Ask me about the Internet as it always was supposed to be and I would say that there should be no audio content, no interesting sound bytes, buried away without the possibility to find them and to share them easily. We need the fragment level access, the deep links, the player that tells us what is where when we're listening.

Can we get you to do this for us BBC? You might notice that my YouTube solution here is quite ugly and and strictly speaking probably not at all what you have in mind for me to be doing with this content.

But let me assume that the mp3 is online in order to be listened to and shared. Let's continue our search to find new ways to make this possible.

I am not my website: Warning! Something's not right here.

The server hosting the MediaEval website was compromised 16 February and infected with malware in the form of lines added into the .html code of several of the pages.

Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics caught the problem and MediaEval community members saw the warning in their browsers and started writing me immediately.

I fixed it quite quickly. However, at the moment, Chrome (above), Firefox and Safari and probably also other browsers are presenting this error screen. The malware is gone, but people are still being for-all-practical-purposes prevented from visiting the MediaEval site.

The warning links to a safe browsing diagnostics page that states, "Of the 3 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 2 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded without user consent." But that's pretty deep to have to dig to understand that the danger has been taken care of. The implication is that it's going to take us 90 days of a clean record to get back in the good graces of Google Safe Browsing Diagnostics.

At the bottom, the diagnostics page tells me that as the website owner I can request a review of the site using Google Webmaster Tools. It's nice to find a helping hand extended in a tough situation.

However,what happened next echoed the text of the warning: Something's really not right here. I have been quite concerned about Google's new privacy policy and my interaction with the Webmaster Tools further deepened that concern today.

Google Webmaster Tools wanted me to verify that I was the owner of the website, and, of course, it does this using my Google login. Now, that site is linked at the hip to this blog.

I suppose that was obvious anyway, for anyone reading the content. And people ask me why I care about some association that is deep in a Google server somewhere. It's a slippery slope, yeah sure. Let me articulate why I am not comfortable with this latest slide downwards.

I put a lot of thought into the fact that MediaEval is a community-driven initiative for which I act as the "glue person". Glue person means doing the infrastructure (which amounts to keeping a bunch of plates all spinning at the same time like they do in the circus) and co-ordinating the process by which we make tough decisions (in cases in which such are necessary). My MediaEval activities need to be understood clearly by everyone who cares to scrutinize them as being separate from what is written in this blog---which is my own personal view and does not claim to be anything like a community wide consensus.

The separation of my personal and my public role in MediaEval was previously naturally represented by the fact that on the Internet the default existence for websites are separate entities. These entities were perhaps associated with a webmaster, but that were not linked with a single author/owner person who has a personal history and a private life (as represented by my Google account). Now, I suppose I could set up a separate account to be MediaEval---but these means signing in and out if I want to go from one to the other and that is simply not practical given the amount of work I need to do.

The way that co-operative initiatives like MediaEval grow is that they can be set free from a single person or personality and can take on a life of their own. It's idealistic, I realize, but we do strive for a sort of grassroots democratic process in the benchmark. In order to come anywhere close to this ideal, we need technology whose default mode of operation allows leading members of the community to draw themselves away from the spotlight to stand at the sidelines and give the community room to speak for itself.

Today, I made a quick decision under the pressure of protecting the channel of communication with the MediaEval community. I tied my personal self yet more closely to the site of the benchmarking initiative, when another part of my brain is telling me that for growth and sustainability of the community the trend must go in the other direction.

When I am tired and desperately need a solution, I am in no place to insist on the principle that I am not my website.

I tell myself, that maybe the close technical connection will now remind me to be even more careful in making the conceptual distinction between the two hats I wear: research and community coordinator.

In the meantime, I sit back and take my mind off the issue by enjoying some YouTube---recently a category "Middle Ages" has appeared on my recommendation page. Hey, Google, it's not that kind of mediaeval that I care about! Watches those videos is a welcome form of distraction: especially because it underlines that point that putting all that data in one place isn't really necessarily going to get anyone closer to where they want to be. Let's just hope that the consequences remain innocuous and merely amusing.

The PhD: Reflections of a mentor

This weekend, I have been reflecting on the mystical status of the PhD. I don't recall there ever being a moment when one of the people who mentored my own PhD process made an explicitly formulated and crystal clear declaration of what they believed that a PhD to be. Somehow their opinion remained obscured, the PhD appeared an arcane, untouchable concept and it seemed almost as if its true nature needed to be kept secret. Possibly, avoiding such declarations is grounded in a certain age-old mentoring wisdom. Since "It's different for everyone", it might be better not to set up specific expectations for a given PhD candidate. Or possibly, avoiding such declarations is a natural reaction to the rapid rate at which the PhD is changing. In fact, by necessity the concept of "The PhD" must develop radically in order to remain relevant---a topic generating a high volume of discussion, e.g., a special issue in Nature last year devoted to the future of the PhD. In the end, defining "The PhD" seems to open more questions that it answers.

However, I have been the daily mentor for PhD students for a number of years now and I have reached a point where I feel the need to take a snapshot of my perspective on PhD mentoring and set it down in linear form. Actually, it's not really any sort of a secret, so why not put it on my blog? In this post, I aim to describe what for me is the essence of a PhD and what I perceive to be the role of the PhD mentor. My definition of a PhD is:

A PhD is an independent contribution to the knowledge of humanity.

With independent, I mean that the key conceptual content of the PhD is original and arises from the PhD candidate's own insight. Note that the definition does not specify the magnitude of this contribution, or even a particular way in which the contribution must be measured. These aspects vary from field to field.

Given this variation, how is it possible to know that one has a PhD? In my view, someone has a PhD when:

A PhD candidate has earned their PhD when their supervisor declares that they are satisfied and when the candidate has successfully defended their contribution before a committee.

Working in the Netherlands is interesting, because the "completion criteria" are extremely salient. The PhD supervisor is a professor at the university who has something called ius promovendi, or the right to graduate PhD students. The system is set up to keep the the number of people with this right small and exclusive (the rest of us are merely mentors). The PhD defense is a public ceremony: the PhD candidate wears a tuxedo and the committee is dressed in academic regalia. Women usually don't wear the tuxedo---but choose an equally imposing alternative. The defense itself follows a special form, which includes a particular moment at which the doctorate is granted to the candidate. All in all, the tradition and the spectacle are awe inspiring. What is highlighted is the importance of this single moment, when the academic community represented by the committee tests the candidate and convenes in seclusion and makes the determination that s/he has fulfilled the requirements. It's the only moment when we see the candidate in a tuxedo during the whole PhD process. It's worth reflecting on the fact that it is indeed the sine qua non of the PhD---it is the only moment that occurs by necessity.

Beyond these points, the PhD process in a lot of hard work and keen insight on the part of the candidate and a lot of interaction with colleagues and mentors. In the Netherlands, the PhD is "officially" not a PhD at all, but a doctoraat. Both PhD and doctoraat are variations on a "research doctorate". I try to be sensitive to cultural differences between my Anglophone conceptions of the PhD and what is common here---but mostly these have turned out to be superficial (e.g., the mandatory tuxedos).

If the PhD candidate is the one doing the thinking and the heavy scientific lifting, what, one wonders, is exactly the role of the mentor? This role is, of course, going to vary widely from person to person, but it's worth trying to capture those aspects that remain invariant. Here is a list of the points that, in my mind, a mentor is responsible for:

1. Making sure that the candidate has the skills and tools necessary to be a successful researcher. The candidate should be completely comfortable with carrying out the steps of the scientific method. Usually, people are well versed in the scientific method when they start their PhDs. What often needs a bit of help is recognizing the worthwhile examples and not so worthwhile examples of the scientific method. One learns this discrimination through practice and (again) a lot of thinking about it.
2. Making sure the candidate has a viable topic. A PhD topic will stays with someone for the rest of their life. The mentor needs to the very best of their ability to guide the PhD candidate into growth areas and away from research dead-ends.
3. Reminding the candidate to converge. It's only one little word in the definition above, but it is important to note that a PhD is an independent contribution and not many independent contributions. Good PhD students will generate ideas during their PhD, which will feed the rest of their scientific careers. The mentor should offer gentle reminders that the PhD thesis is finite in length and does not need to address every vista that arises in the course of investigation.
4. Guiding the PhD candidate to acculturating into the research community. The process involves discussing the particular topics and methodologies used by a particular community (in our case, these communities are defined by specific conferences and journals) and also facilitating introductions of the candidate to other members of the community. The mentor should keep in mind that acculturation is bi-directional, i.e., that PhD candidates are also destined to change the communities that they join.
5. Giving the PhD candidate space to fail. A certain number of failure experiences during the PhD-process ensures that we are actually testing the boundaries of the scientific field and pushing into uncharted territory. The space should be so large and generous, so that there is a non-vanishing possibility that the PhD candidate fails at the entire PhD. The number of "total failure" cases should be kept minimal and mentors should be vigilant to spot high risk cases early on in the process. However, it is critical to maintain room for failure in order to encourage the risk taking necessary to ensure that PhD research produces progress in the state of the art.
6. Supporting the PhD student in understanding where they would like to go with their career after the PhD and how to get there. This point is difficult due to the unpredictable nature of the economy and, well, of the future in general. However, discussion of "life beyond defense" is helpful to achieving convergence (mentioned under point 3) and also to avoiding a letdown after defense, which has been likened to postpartum depression.

Equally important perhaps, is what the mentor doesn't do:

The mentor does not formulate the statement of the candidate's "independent contribution" for the candidate. The candidate comes up with the statement of the independent contribution. The mentor helps to formulate the research questions addressed by the candidate in the natural course of 1.-5. above. However, there is a moment in time when the candidate articulates the key contribution and the mentor says, "Hey, yeah, that's it."

There may be an actual audible click heard at this moment---colleagues like to report having actually heard it. On the other hand, some PhD candidates come up with a new formulation of their independent contribution every week and the process involves more of a sorting and winnowing rather than of a flash of enlightenment. All the same, the independent contribution is originated and owned by the candidate.

At first, making an independent contribution might sound a bit scarey to PhD candidates, since it's actually impossible to know in advance if of oneself if one will make a contribution before one actually knows what the contribution is. The two must necessarily occur in exactly the same moment: there are no guarantees.

However, when I dig a little deeper I find that most people that come to me for mentoring are there because they have a strong intuition about themselves that they have this contribution to make, that it's somewhere there inside of them and that they are looking for a way to realize it.

They also more or less consciously know that the formulation of the contribution is the fun part. In the end, a scientist or an engineer needs a PhD the way a Formula 1 racer needs a driver's license. It's a necessary part of what we do, but it's far, far away from being the actual essence of the scientific endeavor.

What I'd really would like the PhD students I mentor to understand is this: The way it works is that you wake up one morning and realize that in your own mind you are already through it, and have accomplished it with poise and flare. You see that really all of those people who you thought were being so critical are just standing there helping you along and itching to see you show your stuff on international race tracks around the world. There's a huge party of course, but then you are on to other things and don't really think about having passed your driver's test.

But it's the Netherlands, and you don't need a car. So let me spend a few words on bicycles. The PhD process is also a bit like riding a bicycle: when you first learn to balance yourself, you sort of have the feeling that it will fall over at any minute. But very quickly you are riding ahead and it just works and you are fully focused on where you are going and don't think about falling. And then you arrive and you yourself know that you have got there.

The interesting point about using the bicycle comparison is this: The whole nature of what a bicycle is would be altered if someone invented one you could ride and be 100% guaranteed never to fall. I certainly don't think any of the people I know here in the Netherlands would ride a bike like that. Riding a bike is about getting where you need to be.

So the PhD candidate is riding a bicycle towards a goal and the contribution of the mentor is...

...well, the candidate shouldn't even really be noticing that the mentor is making a contribution. Rather, the candidate should be wondering why the mentor doesn't have time to read all the related work papers that s/he is leaving on their desk and why the mentor sort of nods dumbly when s/he has bring them up to speed by explaining to them exactly why these papers contribute to the formulation of the research question or provide support for the experimental methods or results for the particular building block of the theses currently being worked on. Aaaargh! Points 1.-6. above, great, yeah, but what is the mentor actually doing?

Right. That right there is the PhD. In the end, there will be a certain healthy degree of ambiguity of whether the candidates achievement occurred because of the mentor or despite the mentor.

OK. That last part had a definitely mystical ring to it. And the fact that I myself have arrived as such a statement, makes it clearer to me why none of my own mentors ever explicitly formulated and crystal clear declaration of what a PhD is. They probably did, but I didn't recognize at the time that an essential part of the clarity lies in its very ambiguity.

I never pushed any of them either on this point---never asked for a definition. So then am I pushing myself now?

Actually, I think that in part it has to do with the tuxedos. In the Netherlands, that "Hey, yeah, that's it." moment on the part of the mentor is accompanied by a flash of this mental image of the candidate standing at the podium wearing a tuxedo and performing fabulously during the defense. Since my scientific training comes from outside of the Netherlands, my own natural inclination if you ask me to support someone towards wearing a tuxedo is teaching them how to waltz---which is with a large probability irrelevant. The irrelevance of my personal associations with tuxedos to "The PhD" triggered me to start thinking about what is relevant and to set down my perspective in linear form---quite probably, in the end, opening more questions than I have answered.

Core Participants in MediaEval Tasks

This week, I have been answering email from people who have proposed tasks for the MediaEval 2012 multimedia benchmark or have been contacted about becoming a core participant for a task. The emails have been asking for clarification on what exactly a MediaEval task core participant is. Instead of writing the same email back to everyone, I am putting my answer in this blog post.

The only official definition of a core participant is "A participating team that agrees, before the official beginning of MediaEval task sign up, to cross the finish line for a given task come hell or high water". I am actively looking for a paraphrase of this definition, but for the moment, please be tolerant of the use of an idiomatic phrase (and one containing the word "hell" at that.)

How can a core participant team be sure in February that they will complete a task in late summer? Usually, a core participant will be able to reliably predict that they will cross the finish line on a task because have successfully completed similar tasks in the past. In most cases, they will have a specific person or persons on their team who is working on the task as an integral part of their research project.

If you don't think that you can commit to being a core participant, that is absolutely fine. You can sign up for the task with the normal sign up procedure and participate as a general participant. General participants must make a genuine effort to complete the task and we also expect them to attend the MediaEval workshop if at all humanly possible. General participants also have a much longer window in which to consider task participation before deciding to sign up. Regular sign up won't close until the end of April 2012.

Within MediaEval, fine-grained decisions are left as much as possible to the organizers of the individual tasks. The consequences are that, other than the "come hell of high water" definition, it is left up to the task organizers to interpret exactly what a core participant is. For this reason, the detailed discussion of the matter appears on my blog and not on the MediaEval website.

In order to understand what a core participant might do in any given task, here is the story of the history of "core participants" in MediaEval tasks.

We introduced the notion of core participants after the MediaEval 2010 workshop. At the workshop, we had noticed that (not surprisingly) tasks for which there were a lot of results to compare gave us more interesting insight. We wanted to have a way of ensuring that a minimal number of teams would complete any given task, but we didn't want to use a inelegant, alienating solution, such as cancelling tasks which don't receive a minimum number of successful run submissions. For this reason, a task is required to produce evidence that it will have a minimum number of results to compare at the workshop before being officially accepted as a MediaEval task. This evidence takes the form of collecting a list of core participants.

While the season is running, the task organizers might ask the core participants to help out with the task. For example, last year core participants helped debug the evaluation script. Another example is supporting newcomers. Sometimes new participants in MediaEval need help in understanding some details of the instructions. In this case, a task organizer might ask an experienced core participant to communicate with a newbie. Newbies are often students that have just started their MSc or PhD programs and have a lot to think about at once---we don't want them getting stuck on easily answered questions. It might also save them time if they can communicate with someone in a language that they can type more quickly then English. That someone could be a core participant.

There is a clear line between a task organizer and a core participant. A core participant does not have any official responsibility other than finishing the task. Core participants help the task organizers only if they feel inspired to---it's not required. We also assume that core participants are removed enough from the data set creation process that it is impossible for them to have a relative advantage on any given task over a general participant. For this reason, their scores can be included in the official ranking of scores for a task presented at the MediaEval workshop---task organizers are highly encouraged to carry out their own tasks, but their scores are officially excluded in the ranking presented at the workshop.

Google's new privacy policy will further squelch my social life, and possibly also kill Christmas

So yesterday I saw some screen flash up again from Google concerning the new privacy policy. But I was intent on logging into Gmail to chat my Groundhog Day greetings out to my little social world that I clicked on 'Got it' without really a second glance at all of that carefully crafted text that they had written on the page. Hmm. Looks pretty lean for a privacy policy, but I have a bad feeling. I don't think I'll like this.

And I don't. Just as sure as the groundhog saw his shadow yesterday and we received a generous blanket of snow today. I believe there's another six weeks (well, five weeks and six days) of winter coming.

And there's a serious chilly weather coming on in my social life. Google is going to mix up my Gmail, which is a chaotic mixture of shopping and friends, with my YouTube account, which I use to post video for work. The result is sure to be some weird distorted echo of myself that's neither productive nor fun.

I mean, as kids we do the thing of taking a range of food items out of the refrigerator and putting them in the blender. It starts out a strawberry milkshake, but then you get the idea to add a some capers and a spoonful of peanut butter and then some powdered sugar and a zap of lemon juice. It's fun to mix stuff up but the result is usually pretty gross and the main life lesson we learn with this experiment is that there truly is a reason why we generally like to eat our food in separate dishes and don't mash everything together in the middle of the plate.

Now I have to worry about chats from my friends contaminating the little YouTube garden I have been cultivating on the topic of multimedia information retrieval. Am I going to be looking at my YouTube page with colleagues at work and have to wondering if they will see recommendations for videos of things that I have been chatting about? Is my video recommendation list about to be infected by groundhogs? Other rodents?

Today someone wrote me an email mentioning a Wizards/Raptors game. I have no idea what sport this is: and YouTube's going to be mixing it up with the videos I actually want to see? Am I going to write back and say "Please, include no Wizards or Raptors in your messages to me"? Oh dear, that's really going to go down well with my friends.

For me, it's a cold chill without the mitigating effect of a truly cute and relevant rodent or the promise of a mere six weeks duration.

This year, I will be definitely worrying about accidentally doing a Google search in the presence of one of my family members and having my Christmas shopping list lifted from my email and plunked down in the ads or the personalization of my search results. What happened to surprising people with a unexpected holiday gift? Who would have thought that Google turns out to be the Grinch who Stole Christmas? Do I seriously have to hesitate before spontaneously turning my laptop screen so that someone else can seen my browser and I can help them find something on the Internet?

The New York Times tells us that the EU is pressing Google to delay the new privacy policy until the implications can be better understood. I am not the only one, apparently, with the bad feeling. It looks lean, but its not at all a reassuring lean.

Social media is about the joy of the spur of the moment chat -- and what I have right now is a bad taste in my mouth. My natural human urge to share spontaneous Groundhog greetings prompted me initially to click right through the page of information on the new privacy policy without reading it in detail. That was not a responsible click. That bad taste is not only the oncoming strawberry, caper, peanut butter milkshake, but also the yet further erosion of my ability to trust my social intuitions of what topics to raise when with whom. Google seems to want to help make that decision for me.

It looks like I'll be pulling the adjective 'insidious' off the shelf, dusting it off and using it more often.

Just look at this blog post: it's rodents, raptors, strawberries, videos and snow. Any algorithm that's trying to make me a content recommendation on the basis of this text is going to come up with 'quirky', nothing more. Mix all my personal stuff together, Google, and you get...well, useless mud: It is useless, strawberry flavored mud with perhaps a hint of groundhog. You don't need this stuff Google. Think of something else and don't send you privacy policy off in completely the wrong direction.