CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Investigating user experience and bias mitigation of the multi-modal retrieval of historical data

Decolonisation has raised the discussion of technology having the responsibility of presenting multiple perspectives to users. This is specifically relevant to African precolonial heritage artefact data, where the data contains the bias of the curators of the artefacts and there are primary concerns surrounding the social responsibility of these systems. Historians have argued that common information retrieval algorithms may further bias results presented to users. While research for mitigating bias in information retrieval is steered in the direction of artificial intelligence and automation, an often-neglected approach is that of user-control. User-control has proven to be beneficial in other research areas and is strongly aligned with the core principles of decolonisation. Thus, the effects on user experience, bias mitigation, and retrieval effectiveness from the addition of user-control and algorithmic variation to a multimodal information retrieval system containing precolonial African heritage data was investigated in this study. This was done by conducting two experiments: 1) an experiment to provide a baseline offline evaluation of various algorithms for text and image retrieval and 2) an experiment to investigate the user experience with a retrieval system that allowed them to compare algorithms. In the first experiment, the differences in retrieval effectiveness between colour-based pre-processing algorithms, shape-based preprocessing algorithms, and pre-processing algorithms based on a combination of colour- and shape-detection, was explored. The differences in retrieval effectiveness between stemming, stopword removal and synonym query expansion was also evaluated for text retrieval. In the second experiment, the manner in which users experience bias in the context of common information retrieval algorithms for both the textual and image data that are available in typical historical archives was explored. Users were presented with the results generated by multiple algorithmic variations, in a variety of different result formats, and using a variety of different search methods, affording them the opportunity to decide what they deem provides them with a more relevant set of results. The results of the study show that algorithmic variation can lead to significantly improved retrieval performance with respect to image-based retrieval. The results also show that users potentially prefer shape-based image algorithms rather than colour-based image algorithms, and, that shape-based image algorithms can lead to significantly improved retrieval of historical data. The results also show that users have justifiable preferences for multimodal query and result formats to improve user experience and that users believe they can control bias using algorithmic variatio

CLOSER: A Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice

Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architectur

Query Modification Patterns and Concept Analysis of Web Image Queries

ABSTRACT This study investigated query modification patterns and concepts used in query construction during users' searching images on the Web. It examined whether query modifications were related to different content collections, and analyzed what attributes were used to formulate a query in an interactive web searching process. Findings of the study show that query modification patterns were significantly associated with content collections. Terms related to format or specific objects to represent an image were found to be frequently used in reformulations and specializations. The findings suggest that system features for flexible query formulation and navigation would support users' image search process

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

09101 Abstracts Collection -- Interactive Information Retrieval

From 01.03. to 06.03.2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09101 ``Interactive Information Retrieval \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available