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Inaugural lecture by Professor Stefan Rueger
This lecture will examine the challenges and opportunities of Multimedia Information Retrieval and corresponding search engine applications.
Computer technology has changed our access to information tremendously:
We used to search authors or titles (which we had to know) in library cards in order to locate relevant books; now we can issue keyword searches within the full text of whole book repositories to identify the authors, titles and locations of relevant books. What about the corresponding challenge of finding multimedia by fragments, examples and excerpts?
Rather than asking for a music piece by artist and title, can we hum its tune to find it? Can doctors submit scans of a patient to identify medically similar images of diagnosed cases in a database? Can your mobile phone take a picture of a statue and tell you about its artist and significance via a service that it sends this picture to?
Some of the challenges of these questions are given by the semantic gap between what computers can index and high-level human concepts; related to this is an inherent technological limitation of automated annotation of images from pixels alone. Other challenges are given by polysemy, ie, the many meanings and interpretations that are inherent in visual material and the corresponding wide range of a user's information need. Stefan will argue that these challenges can be tackled by automated processing and machine learning and by utilising the skills of the user, for example through browsing or through a process that is called relevance feedback, thus putting the user at centre stage. Other automated processing methods that discover and disambiguate locations in wikipedia (an online, linked, multilingual and open content encyclopedia) will be shown to give surprising insights into the human nature of its view of the world.
Stefan Rueger joined The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute in September 2006 to take up a chair in Knowledge Media. Before that he was a Reader in Multimedia and Information Systems at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, where he also held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (1999-2004). Stefan is a theoretical physicist by training (FU Berlin) and received his PhD in the field of computing for his work on artificial intelligence and, in particular, the theory of neural networks from TU Berlin in 1996. Since then he has made a continuous journey from theory to its applications in multimedia retrieval. During his academic career he has co-authored over 100 scientific publications. He now heads a 12-strong team working in the wider area of Multimedia and Information Systems.
Community service. Stefan chairs the - originally EPSRC funded - research network on Multimedia Knowledge Management that comprises eight UK universities. He acts as associate editor for two journals and referees for 23 other Computing journals, 25 different international conferences and eight research funders including the Commission of the European Communities and the European Research Council. Stefan is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy; a member of the EPSRC College, IEEE, ACM and BCS; and is treasurer of the BCS Specialist Group for Information Retrieval. Stefan also serves as a London Technology Network Business Fellow for the Centre for Research in Computing at The Open University.
For further information and publications see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/mmis.
