Call for Contributions

Multimedia analytics is a new and exciting research area that combines techniques from multimedia analysis, visual analytics, and data management, with a focus on creating systems for analysing large-scale multimedia collections. The size and complexity of media collections is ever increasing, as is the desire to harvest useful information from these collections, with expected impacts ranging from the advancement of science to increased company profits. Indeed, multimedia analytics sees potential applications in diverse fields, including data journalism, urban computing, lifelogging, digital heritage, healthcare, digital forensics, natural sciences, and social media. We therefore consider multimedia analytics to be one of the core research challenges of the multimedia research community.

We primarily seek three kinds of contributions:

• [NEW!] Experience papers: As the year 2020 started with the worldwide COVID19 pandemic, many crucial decisions (e.g., in relation with logistics, health, confinement, transportation, industrial emergency productions, and (fake) news propagation) were taken by public bodies running analytics tasks against very diverse data feeds. Multimedia analytics might have received an unexpected jump-start and we call for papers which analytically and critically share experiences from such projects.
• Position papers: These papers can address various aspects of multimedia analytics. We prefer position papers that are backed up by recent results, which could be already published or appear first in the paper.
• Research papers: These papers should present recent and relevant research results that may have deep implications for multimedia analytics. These papers might include system papers, algorithm papers, and user evaluation papers.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Applications of multimedia analytics, including novel applications.
• Techniques and algorithms for multimedia analytics.
• Systems, services and implementations for multimedia analytics.
• Evaluations of multimedia analytics tools and techniques.
• Definitions, directions and/or critique of multimedia analytics.

In the first half of the session, each presenter will be given 8 minutes to present the main ideas of the paper. In the remainder of the session, we will host a panel with questions from the audience and the session organizers. In this manner, we invite discussions and debates that can potentially increase the understanding of the participants (speakers, organizers and audience) of this new and exciting field.

Recently, research papers have been published in MMM and other multimedia conferences (e.g., ACM Multimedia, ACM ICMR, Multimedia Systems, ICME) that focus on various aspects of multimedia analytics. However, we feel that the community is lacking an interactive venue for discussion, where definitions and directions can be proposed and debated, and we will provide such a venue in this special session. This session follows four previous sessions: MAPTA 2020, MAPTA 2019, MAPTA 2018 and PMA 2016.