Thierry Declerck, DFKI, Germany

Human Language Technology for Multimedia Analysis

Thierry Declerck is senior consultant at DFKI's Language Technology lab and he is currently leading the DFKI contribution to the European Network of Excellence "K-Space" (Knowledge Space of semantic inference for automatic annotation and retrieval of multimedia content). He is currently mainly involved in research activities dealing with the relationship between language technology and semantic web on the one side and multimedia analysis on the other side. Thierry Declerck was also in the past representing the University of the Saarland in the European IST Network of Excellence SCHEMA (Network of Excellence in Content-Based Semantic Scene Analysis and Information Retrieval).

He already gave lectures on issues related to the same topic at the European Summer School on Language Logic and Information (ESSLLI) in 2004 and 2005, and at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) in 2006.

J. Stephen Downie, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Music Information Retrieval

Dr. J. Stephen Downie is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is Director of the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL). Professor Downie is Principal Investigator on the Human Use of Music Information Retrieval Systems (HUMIRS) and the Music to Knowledge (M2K) music data-mining projects. He has been very active in the establishment of the Music Information Retrieval and Music Digital Library communities through his ongoing work with the ISMIR series of MIR conferences as a member of the ISMIR steering committee. He is also the director of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX).

Lynda Hardman, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, The Netherlands

Multimodal interaction

Lynda Hardman is the head of the Semantic Media Interfaces theme at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include the automatic generation of user-tailored hypermedia presentations (K-Space NoE, Passepartout, MultimediaN/E-Culture, NASH, ToKeN2000 I2RP and CHIME) and document models for hypermedia and synchronized multimedia on the Web (SMIL). She is also part-time full professor of Multimedia and Internet Computing at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Information Systems Group of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. She is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics and the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. In 2000 I co-edited the special issue on spatial and time-based hypermedia. In 2003 she was co-programme chair for ACM Hypertext 2003. She runs the Interaction Design for the Semantic Web module of User System Interaction at the TU/e.

Alex Hauptmann, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Cross-modal analysis

Alex Hauptmann is Senior Systems Scientist in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and a faculty member in the Language Technologies Institute. His current main interest has been on multi-media analysis and retrieval. Other research interests include speech recognition and interfaces, translation and natural language in general. Most of his time is spent on the Informedia Digital Video project (http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu). This work has spawned three spin-off companies, related to digital video archiving and video question answering.

Alex is also pursuing projects on video observations for patient care for the elderly and personal wearable memory devices. His current passion is the pursuit of a large-scale concept ontology for multimedia to help narrow the semantic gap.

Alex holds a BA and MA degree in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University, a 'Diplom' in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Berlin (and obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Noel O'Connor, Dublin City University, Ireland

Image and video processing

Noel E. O’Connor graduated from Dublin City University with a B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering (1992) and a PhD (1998), after working for 2 years as a research assistant for Teltec Ireland at DCU. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electronic Engineering and a PI in the Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP), a 55-person research centre, which he co-founded with Alan Smeaton. Since 1999 he has published over 130 peer-reviewed publications, 11 standards submissions, filed 5 patents and spun off a campus company, Aliope Ltd, with others from CDVP. He is the Irish representative to the world-wide ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) standards body. He acted as integrator for the software implementation of MPEG-4 that now forms an informative annex to the standard and was part of a small team whose technology proposal to MPEG-7 was selected as the starting point for the standard. He has acted as PC Chair for 3 international conferences and regularly reviews for a number of respected journals and as a PC member for many international conferences (8 in 2006). He was an expert evaluator for EU FP6 proposals as well as acting as a reviewer for specific projects for both the EU and Enterprise Ireland. He edited 5 special issues of different journals including Multimedia Tools and Applications and the Journal of Web Semantics. He is a member of the IEEE, Engineers Ireland and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Steve Renals, University of Edinburgh, UK

Speech processing

Steve Renals is professor of Speech Technology in the School of Informatics, and director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the area of signal-based approaches to human communication, in particular spoken language processing and machine learning approaches to modelling multimodal data. He has over a hundred publications in these areas. He is an associate editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and a former member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Machine Learning and Signal Processing. His current research projects include AMI and AMIDA, two EC Framework VI integrated projects, and EdSST (Edinburgh Speech Science and Technology), a Marie Curie Early Stage Training project.

Gaël Richard, GET, France

Audio processing

Currently, Professor and leader of the Audio, Acoustics and Waves Group in the Department of Signal and Image Processing at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST) in Paris. He obtained in 1990 the Engineer diploma of ENST and a Ph.D thesis in 1994 completed at LIMSI-CNRS (University of Orsay) in the area of speech synthesis. He then spent two years at the CAIP Center (Rutgers University, USA) in the speech processing group of Prof. James Flanagan where he explored innovative approaches for speech production based on fluid flow principles. In early 1997, He joined Matra Nortel Communications (France), as a project manager. He was in particular the project manager of several European projects (ACTS-M2VTS " Multimodal Verification for Teleservices and Security Applications ", Telematics-SpeechDat-Car "Speech data collection in automotive environment"). He was also responsible of the Audio tasks of the ACTS-EMPHASIS project in which he worked in speech coding and 3D audio rendering. He joined Philips Consumer Communications in September 2000 as the speech recognition competence team leader. Co-author of over 70 papers and 5 patents, he received in September 2001, the "/Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches/" from the university of Orsay (Paris XI). He joined ENST in September 2001 where he is now Full Professor in the field of speech and audio signal processing. He is also a senior member of IEEE.

Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow, UK

IR foundations

Professor and leader of the Information Retrieval Group, in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, UK. Since about 1969 his research has been devoted to information retrieval, covering both theoretical and experimental aspects. He has specified several theoretical models for IR and seen some of them from the specification and prototype stage through to production. His current research is concerned with the design of appropriate logics to model the flow of information. He has been involved in a number of EU projects and working groups on IR, including Fermi, Miro, Mira, Idomeneus, and more recently K-space. He is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Edinburgh, IEE, BCS, and ACM. In 1993 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, an appointment he held until 2000. He has served as a programme committee member and editorial board member of the major IR conferences and journals. He is the author of a well-known book Information Retrieval, Butterworths, 1979. In 1999, together with Crestani and Lalmas, he published a book entitled "Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics". His most recent book is The Geometry of Information Retrieval, CUP, 2004. He was awarded the Tony Kent Strix award in 2004 and the Gerard Salton Award in 2006.

Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, Ireland

Multimedia IR evaluation initiatives

Alan Smeaton is a Professor of Computing and Founding Director of the Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University. He holds the B.Sc., M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Ireland. He is a Principal Investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland funded Adaptive Information Cluster, a cross-University grouping of more than 100 researchers working in the broad area of harvesting and using information from diverse sources. Alan has published more than 200 journal, book chapter and conference papers, mostly in the area of information retrieval from diverse media sources. He is strongly associated with the TRECVid evaluation benchmarking campaign, funded by ARDA and run by NIST, which he has been coordinating since it started in 2001. His current research activities are funded by SFI, EU FP6 projects, Enterprise Ireland, Microsoft Research, Google and by other industry partners.

Cees Snoek, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Concept-based video indexing and retrieval

Cees G.M. Snoek received the M.Sc. degree in business information systems (2000) and the Ph.D. degree in computer science (2005) both from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he is currently a senior researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam. He was a Visiting Scientist at Informedia, Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2003. His research interests focus on multimedia signal processing and analysis, statistical pattern recognition, content-based information retrieval, and large-scale benchmark evaluations, especially when applied in combination for multimedia understanding. Dr. Snoek is a lead architect of the award-winning MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine (www.mediamill.nl), which obtained state-of-the-art performance in recent NIST TRECVID evaluations. He is the local chair of the 2007 ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval in Amsterdam (www.civr2007.com).

Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Semantic Web/Ontology

Professor for Databases & Information Systems, Head of Research Group "ISWeb - Information Systems and Semantic Web", Institute for Computer Science, Faculty of Computer Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau. He has earned a M.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA and a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany, both in computer science. His research interests are in Semantic Web, Knowledge Management, Metadata, Semantic Interoperability, Text Mining, Emergent Semantics, Self-organizing Information Systems; He has written over 70 publications in information extraction, data mining, knowledge management, and, in particular, the Semantic Web.

Andrew Zisserman, University of Oxford, UK

Character retrieval and annotation in multimedia — or "How to find Buffy"

Graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in theoretical physics and, for the last 20 years, he has carried out research in the area of computer vision. He is a professor in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. He has coauthored and coedited several books in this area. The most recent, Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision (with Richard Hartley), has now been published as a second edition in paperback and also translated into Chinese. He has been a program cochair and general cochair of ICCV. Software from his research group was marketed by the spin out company 2d3 (www.2d3.com) as a camera tracker for the special effects industry. This was awarded a Technical Emmy in 2002. He has been awarded the IEEE Marr Prize three times.