At this weeks ACM Multimedia, the solutions for the Multimedia Grand Challenges will be presented. The Multimedia Grand Challenge presents a set of problems and issues from industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 3-5 year vision for multimedia. MediaMixer and VideoLectures.NET have introduced a brand new challenge this year, along their vision of enabling fragmentation of online media and annotating it to support new services like VideoLecturesMashup. 

In a session on Thursday both shortlisted solutions will be presented and a winner will be announced, winning a MediaMixer prize to travel to Ljubljana and meet the VideoLectures.NET team:

• “Multi-factor Segmentation for Topic Visualization and Recommendation: the MUST-VIS System.” Chidansh Bhatt, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Maryam Habibi, Sandy Ingram, Stefano Masneri, Fergus McInnes, Nikolaos Pappas and Oliver Schreer.
• “Lecture Video Segmentation by Automatically Analyzing the Synchronized Slides.” Xiaoyin Che, Haojin Yang and Christoph Meinel.

The partner EURECOM, represented by Raphael Troncy, will keynote at two International Semantic Web Conference 2013 (ISWC2013) workshops, speaking about Media Fragments and then their annotation (basing on the entity extraction technology NERD):

* A talk at the First International Workshop on Semantic Music and Media (SNAM) entitled “Deep-linking into Media Assets at the Fragment Level: Specification, Model and Applications”, see http://semanticmedia.org.uk/smam2013/#programme

* A talk at the NLP & DBpedia Workshop entitled “NERD: an open source platform for extracting and disambiguating named entities in very diverse documents”, see http://nlp-dbpedia2013.blogs.aksw.org/program/

For those not in Sydney, Australia this week MediaMixer will publish the slides as soon as we have them!

MediaMixer is pleased to show its industry demonstrators during ACM Multimedia 2013, taking place next week in Barcelona, Oct 23-25 2013. The first public showing of the industry benefits from semantic multimedia fragment technology covers:

• VideoLecturesMashup, offering online learners the opportunity to explore a topic or subject across parts of different learning materials;
• Rights Integration and Intelligence for your Media, giving companies an intuitive tool to semantically model the Copyright of their media and a reasoner to determine permissions for re-use or purchase;
• Re-use of Video in the Newsroom, demonstrating a tool for newsrooms to directly browse and include relevant video fragments into their news programming.

MediaMixer’s demos will be shown during conference breaks from Wednesday morning until Friday lunchtime, and visitors who see a demo & leave their business card will also receive a MediaMixer stressball, memo holder or pen*!

Find out more about MediaMixer’s use cases (free registration to access materials)!

See you at #acmmm13!

* Subject to availability!

The MediaMixer project is pleased to announce the release of the recording of our first Webinar “What is MediaMixing?” by Lyndon Nixon (MODUL University). Dr Nixon is the coordinator of the MediaMixer project and in this talk he explains how MediaMixer was set up to react to enterprise trends in increased media creation and re-use, and why we believe semantic multimedia technology can support making media assets more valuable for their owner and more useful for their consumer.

This is the first in a set of Webinars on MediaMixer technology and their benefits for the enterprise, see http://mediamixer.eu/live for the full schedule and past Webinar recordings.

MediaMixer Webinars are made possible thanks to the Jozef Stefan Institute and VideoLectures.NET.

The next LIVE MediaMixer Webinar will take place on Wednesday 2 October at 1400 CET streamed at http://mediamixer.eu/live.

Our colleague Raphael Troncy (EURECOM) will give an introduction to the Media Fragments specification, already a recommendation at the W3C, which allows for an agreed syntax to refer to parts of media assets using Web-friendly URIs. He will go on to discuss how annotations may be attached to those Media Fragments so that media metadata can become more fine grained, allowing for retrieval and re-use of media at the fragment level.

Join the live presentation and discuss with us via Twitter @project_mmixer. Webinars are also recorded and will be available online at http://mediamixer.eu/live later. MediaMixer community members receive regular mails reminding them of MediaMixer activities – join free at http://community.mediamixer.eu 

Calling all interested multimedia practitioners, especially MSc/PhD students with a research topic covering Multimedia Applications or Multimedia Processing, we are pleased to announce that our Winter School is now open for registration!

Attendees will hear about and get hands on experience with semantic multimedia technologies including media fragments, analysis, annotation and digital rights, from MediaMixer partner experts.  Invited speakers (EU project coordinators!) will give insights in current & future use of the technology in their domains (broadcasting, digital preservation, e-learning…)

Even better, while stand alone registration for this event is already amazingly low (€150 !), thanks to our cooperation with the MMM 2014 conference, conference registrees need only pay €50 more on their registration fee to attend the school!

For more about the school, see http://winterschool.mediamixer.eu

For registration, go to http://mmm2014.org/registration/