We are happy to announce the 1st International Workshop on Social Events in Web Multimedia, taking place in conjunction with ICMR 2014 (Glasgow, Scotland).

The modeling, detection and processing of events in video is an area that has started to receive considerable attention by the multimedia community, and is supported by both the LinkedTV and MediaMixer projects, who promote the value of richer annotation of web multimedia to industry communities such as broadcasters, media archives and producers.

This Workshop aims to attract and present the latest developments and results on the discovery of social events from web multimedia content, and on techniques for the detection and retrieval of media items that are related to such social events. By social events, we refer to events that are planned by people, are attended by people, and are represented by multimedia and in general social media content that is captured by people.

The target audience of this workshop includes all researchers and practitioners interested in the better understanding of multimedia retrieval and of events in the context of the Web and/or social networks. Submission of papers deadline is February 1st 2014, for more see the Call for Papers.

The EBU Semantic Web Activity Report provides an introduction to Semantic Web technologies for the EBU members and illustrates them through several use cases in the broadcast environment. As the report itself states:

“The purpose of this report is to raise awareness on the importance and high potential of Semantic Web technologies now rapidly developing from initial conceptual prototypes to services in real production also in the broadcasting and media domain. Several successful applications of these technologies now exist for media archives. Others are being considered to enrich second-screen applications or search engines.“

MediaMixer is pleased to have been able to contribute to the report (Section 8), highlighting the use case of re-using media fragments from archived video footage (e.g. to lower cost of new media productions) and pointing to technologies and tools in the areas of Media Fragment Creation, Description, Rights and Management. This is a summary of our very own Core Technology Report, available to community members for free.

At the recent Internet of Education event Lyndon Nixon, co-ordinator of the MediaMixer project, spoke about the offer of MediaMixer technology to the e-learning domain. In particular, he presented how semantic multimedia technology can help online lecture video be split into fragments around distinct topics and mashed up into new learning offers, helping e-learning portals like VideoLectures gain more value from their materials as online learners derive more value from the same materials.

Watch the talk “A MediaMixer for online learning?” online

Tomorrow, 22 November 2013, Martin Dow of project partner ACUITY Unlimited will speak at Archiving Tomorrow 2013 on “MediaMixer technologies: semantic multimedia and media archives”.

Archiving Tomorrow (AT-13) is a new international conference covering aspects of media archiving and restoration. Chaired and supported by leading figures in the film, media and broadcast communities, Archiving Tomorrow will become the premier annual event for archivists, film makers, creatives, academics, manufacturers and those wishing to find out about this exciting area.

MediaMixer is pleased to be involved and to present how the technology it promotes – semantic annotations applied to media fragments – can be used in media archives to improve media search and retrieval at fragment level. We believe the application of MediaMixer technology can contribute to archive materials’ re-use, re-mixing and even re-selling, respecting digital rights and owners’ copyright.

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