An architecture for life-long user modelling

In this paper, we propose a united architecture for the creation of life-long user profiles. Our architecture combines different steps required for a user prole, including feature extraction and representation, reasoning, recommendation and presentation. We discuss various issues that arise in the context of life-long profiling

Vision systems with the human in the loop

The emerging cognitive vision paradigm deals with vision systems that apply machine learning and automatic reasoning in order to learn from what they perceive. Cognitive vision systems can rate the relevance and consistency of newly acquired knowledge, they can adapt to their environment and thus will exhibit high robustness. This contribution presents vision systems that aim at flexibility and robustness. One is tailored for content-based image retrieval, the others are cognitive vision systems that constitute prototypes of visual active memories which evaluate, gather, and integrate contextual knowledge for visual analysis. All three systems are designed to interact with human users. After we will have discussed adaptive content-based image retrieval and object and action recognition in an office environment, the issue of assessing cognitive systems will be raised. Experiences from psychologically evaluated human-machine interactions will be reported and the promising potential of psychologically-based usability experiments will be stressed

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

Tell Your Story: Task-Oriented Dialogs for Interactive Content Creation

People capture photos and videos to relive and share memories of personal significance. Recently, media montages (stories) have become a popular mode of sharing these memories due to their intuitive and powerful storytelling capabilities. However, creating such montages usually involves a lot of manual searches, clicks, and selections that are time-consuming and cumbersome, adversely affecting user experiences. To alleviate this, we propose task-oriented dialogs for montage creation as a novel interactive tool to seamlessly search, compile, and edit montages from a media collection. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to leverage multi-turn conversations for such a challenging application, extending the previous literature studying simple media retrieval tasks. We collect a new dataset C3 (Conversational Content Creation), comprising 10k dialogs conditioned on media montages simulated from a large media collection. We take a simulate-and-paraphrase approach to collect these dialogs to be both cost and time efficient, while drawing from natural language distribution. Our analysis and benchmarking of state-of-the-art language models showcase the multimodal challenges present in the dataset. Lastly, we present a real-world mobile demo application that shows the feasibility of the proposed work in real-world applications. Our code and data will be made publicly available.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

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