Application and evaluation of multi-dimensional diversity

Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems mostly focus on finding documents relevant to queries without considering other documents in the search results. This approach works quite well in general cases; however, this also means that the set of returned documents in a result list can be very similar to each other. This can be an undesired system property from a user's perspective. The creation of IR systems that support the search result diversification present many challenges, indeed current evaluation measures and methodologies are still unclear with regards to specific search domains and dimensions of diversity. In this paper, we highlight various issues in relation to image search diversification for the ImageClef 2009 collection and tasks. Furthermore, we discuss the problem of defining clusters/subtopics by mixing diversity dimensions regardless of which dimension is important in relation to information need or circumstances. We also introduce possible applications and evaluation metrics for diversity based retrieval

Implicit search trails for video recommendation

In this demo paper we demonstrate our approach and system for using implicit actions involved in video search to provide recommendations to users. The goal of this system is to improve the quality of the results that users find, and in doing so, help users to explore a large and difficult information space and help them consider search options that they may not have considered otherwise. Results of a user evaluation show that this approach achieves all of these goals

Search trails using user feedback to improve video search

In this paper we present an innovative approach for aiding users in the difficult task of video search. We use community based feedback mined from the interactions of previous users of our video search system to aid users in their search tasks. This feedback is the basis for providing recommendations to users of our video retrieval system. The ultimate goal of this system is to improve the quality of the results that users find, and in doing so, help users to explore a large and difficult information space and help them consider search options that they may not have considered otherwise. In particular we wish to make the difficult task of search for video much easier for users. The results of a user evaluation indicate that we achieved our goals, the performance of the users in retrieving relevant videos improved, and users were able to explore the collection to a greater extent

Collaborative search trails for video search

In this paper we present an approach for supporting users in the difficult task of searching for video. We use collaborative feedback mined from the interactions of earlier users of a video search system to help users in their current search tasks. Our objective is to improve the quality of the results that users find, and in doing so also assist users to explore a large and complex information space. It is hoped that this will lead to them considering search options that they may not have considered otherwise. We performed a user centred evaluation. The results of our evaluation indicate that we achieved our goals, the performance of the users in finding relevant video clips was enhanced with our system; users were able to explore the collection of video clips more and users demonstrated a preference for our system that provided recommendations

The University of Glasgow at ImageClefPhoto 2009

In this paper we describe the approaches adopted to generate the five runs submitted to ImageClefPhoto 2009 by the University of Glasgow. The aim of our methods is to exploit document diversity in the rankings. All our runs used text statistics extracted from the captions associated to each image in the collection, except one run which combines the textual statistics with visual features extracted from the provided images. The results suggest that our methods based on text captions significantly improve the performance of the respective baselines, while the approach that combines visual features with text statistics shows lower levels of improvements

Diversity, Assortment, Dissimilarity, Variety: A Study of Diversity Measures Using Low Level Features for Video Retrieval

In this paper we present a number of methods for re-ranking video search results in order to introduce diversity into the set of search results. The usefulness of these approaches is evaluated in comparison with similarity based measures, for the TRECVID 2007 collection and tasks [11]. For the MAP of the search results we find that some of our approaches perform as well as similarity based methods. We also find that some of these results can improve the P@N values for some of the lower N values. The most successful of these approaches was then implemented in an interactive search system for the TRECVID 2008 interactive search tasks. The responses from the users indicate that they find the more diverse search results extremely useful

Lucene4IR: Developing information retrieval evaluation resources using Lucene

The workshop and hackathon on developing Information Retrieval Evaluation Resources using Lucene (L4IR) was held on the 8th and 9th of September, 2016 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK and funded by the ESF Elias Network. The event featured three main elements: (i) a series of keynote and invited talks on industry, teaching and evaluation; (ii) planning, coding and hacking where a number of groups created modules and infrastructure to use Lucene to undertake TREC based evaluations; and (iii) a number of breakout groups discussing challenges, opportunities and problems in bridging the divide between academia and industry, and how we can use Lucene for teaching and learning Information Retrieval (IR). The event was composed of a mix and blend of academics, experts and students wanting to learn, share and create evaluation resources for the community. The hacking was intense and the discussions lively creating the basis of many useful tools but also raising numerous issues. It was clear that by adopting and contributing to most widely used and supported Open Source IR toolkit, there were many benefits for academics, students, researchers, developers and practitioners - providing a basis for stronger evaluation practices, increased reproducibility, more efficient knowledge transfer, greater collaboration between academia and industry, and shared teaching and training resources

ICMR 2014: 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval

ICMR was initially started as a workshop on challenges in image retrieval (in Newcastle in 1998 ) and later transformed into the Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) series. In 2011 the CIVR and the ACM Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval were combined into a single conference that now forms the ICMR series. The 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval took place in Glasgow, Scotland, from 1 – 4 April 2014. This was the largest edition of ICMR to date with approximately 170 attendees from 25 different countries. ICMR is one of the premier scientific conference for multimedia retrieval held worldwide, with the stated mission “to illuminate the state of the art in multimedia retrieval by bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field of multimedia retrieval .” According to the Chinese Computing Federation Conference Ranking (2013), ACM ICMR is the number one multimedia retrieval conference worldwide and the number four conference in the category of multimedia and graphics. Although ICMR is about multimedia retrieval, in a wider sense, it is also about automated multimedia understanding. Much of the work in that area involves the analysis of media on a pixel, voxel, and wavelet level, but it also involves innovative retrieval, visualisation and interaction paradigms utilising the nature of the multimedia — be it video, images, speech, or more abstract (sensor) data. The conference aims to promote intellectual exchanges and interactions among scientists, engineers, students, and multimedia researchers in academia as well as industry through various events, including a keynote talk, oral, special and poster sessions focused on re search challenges and solutions, technical and industrial demonstrations of prototypes, tutorials, research, and an industrial panel. In the remainder of this report we will summarise the events that took place at the 4th ACM ICMR conference

Variable blood processing procedures contribute to plasma proteomic variability

Background Plasma is a potentially rich source of protein biomarkers for disease progression and drug response. Large multi-center studies are often carried out to increase the number of samples analyzed in a given study. This may increase the chances of variation in blood processing and handling, leading to altered proteomic results. This study evaluates the impact of blood processing variation on LC–MS/MS proteomic analysis of plasma. Methods Initially two batches of patient plasma samples (120 and 204 samples, respectively) were analyzed using LC–MS/MS shotgun proteomics. Follow-up experiments were designed and carried out on healthy donor blood in order to examine the effects of different centrifugation conditions, length of delay until first centrifugation, storage temperature and anticoagulant type on results from shotgun proteomics. Results Variable levels of intracellular proteins were observed in subsets of patient plasma samples from the initial batches analyzed. This observation correlated strongly with the site of collection, implicating variability in blood processing procedures. Results from the healthy donor blood analysis did not demonstrate a significant impact of centrifugation conditions to plasma proteome variation. The time delay until first centrifugation had a major impact on variability, while storage temperature and anticoagulant showed less pronounced but still significant effects. The intracellular proteins associated with study site effect in patient plasma samples were significantly altered by delayed processing also. Conclusions Variable blood processing procedures contribute significantly to plasma proteomic variation and may give rise to increased intracellular proteins in plasma. Accounting for these effects can be important both at study design and data analysis stages. This understanding will be valuable to incorporate in the planning of protein-based biomarker discovery efforts in the future