Newsletter Issue 6

Editorial | Summer School on Preservation | ELAG 2006 Workshop

DELOS Digital Library Manifesto | Multilinguality in the European Library

Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries | DELOS Researcher Exchange

Joint DELOS- MUSCLE Summer School on Multimedia Digital Libraries

The Gulf of Baratti and the coast of San Vincenzo

The first DELOS-MUSCLE Summer School on "Multimedia Digital Libraries, Machine learning and cross-modal technologies for access and retrieval" was held over 12-17 June 2006 in San Vincenzo, Italy. This particular school was noteworthy since it was the first summer school to be jointly organized by two Networks of Excellence of the sixth EU FP, namely DELOS and MUSCLE. Both NoEs address complementary aspects of research into the management and processing of multimedia data: DELOS working on next-generation digital libraries, with a specific work package devoted to audio and video processing; while MUSCLE is oriented towards the exploitation of machine learning for multimedia data retrieval and cross-media analysis. The combined effort of the two NoEs has led to the compilation of a programme containing lectures from eight highly qualified representatives of research into multimedia from across the world.

Technologies for multimedia digital libraries range over many disciplines: information systems, computer vision, text, audio and image processing, compression and storage, machine learning and information retrieval, multimedia data mining, cross-media analysis, user interfaces and interoperability. The school, organized over a whole week of lectures, morning and afternoon, presented several theoretical and practical aspects in these fields.

The school was located in the charming venue of the 14th century Tower of San Vincenzo, thanks to the support of the Municipality of San Vincenzo. The village is one of the loveliest places on the South Tuscany coast, preserving to this day its picturesque beauty. The School’s attendees greatly appreciated both the location and the other amenities, including the beach barbeque organized for their benefit, together with the birds-of-a-feather session with the visit to Etruscan tombs and the old village of Suvereto.

Visit to the Etruscan Tombs at the Baratti Archeological Site

After an interesting introductory lesson by James Wang of Penn State University, USA, on multimedia digital libraries and management systems, Fernando Pereira of IST, Lisbon, gave an animated and much appreciated talk on the most common standards for audio video material. The lectures by Nicu Siebe (UoA, Amsterdam), Padraig Cunningham (Trinity College, Dublin) and Jia Li (Penn State University, USA) covered in a very comprehensive manner both theoretical issues and practical algorithms for feature extraction, machine learning and retrieval. The talk by Alex Hauptmann of CMU, Pittsburgh, USA, was impressive for its demonstration of the considerable potential of cross-modal retrieval, by joining text, audio and video cues. Finally, the presentations by Milhind Naphade of IBM Watson Research Center, USA and of Alan Smeaton of Trinity College, Dublin, presented on the state of the art of applications and systems in current multimedia digital libraries. They both provided examples and quantitative comparisons taken from TRECVID, the independent evaluation track of the TREC forum devoted to research in automatic segmentation, indexing, and content-based retrieval of digital video streams.

The school was co-organized by representatives of both the DELOS and MUSCLE NoEs, namely Nozha Boujema of INRIA, France, Rita Cucchiara of Univ. of Modena , Italy, Alberto Del Bimbo of Univ. of Florence, Italy and Eric Pauwels of CWI Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The number of registrations proved to be unusually large: the initial maximum of fifty students was increased to sixty in response to demand, with attendees coming from 12 European countries as well as Algeria, Canada, India, Lebanon and Tunisia. The School also set in place an innovation by offering the optional opportunity of a final examination, as now required in the Italian PhD Schools: 22 students sat and passed the examination on the final (very hot!) afternoon of the School. 

A collection of the material from the School’s lecturers is planned for next year as a joint deliverable of the two NoEs in response to the interest occasioned by the topics covered. We can predict with some confidence that this event is likely to be repeated in years to come. The material from the lessons is available on the School website. 

Rita Cucchiara, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

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