MAED 2012 - ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for Ecological Data (MAED 2012)
http://maed2012.dieei.unict.it

Held in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2012, Oct. 29 - Nov. 2, Nara, Japan
Overview
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With the recent progress in digital cameras and sensors, as well as in network bandwidth and information storage capacities, the production of multimedia data has become an easy task, resulting in a huge amount of multimedia available on the web, in broadcast data streams, or in personal and professional databases. This explosion of multimedia data has created the urgent need for efficient organisation, browsing and retrieval tools. It has also generated new possibilities for exploiting multimedia data in diverse and specialized applications that can significantly gain from the analysis and understanding of such data.

Whilst a large number of multimedia analysis and understanding techniques have been developed specifically for investigating events and behaviors in human-centered applications, such as sports and surveillance, relatively little attention has been paid to the understanding of ecology-related multimedia content.

Such content is created at an accelerating pace; for instance, the EcoGrid project (http://ecogrid.nchc.org.tw/ ) has collected many Terabytes of data (videos, images and audio recordings) of monitoring forest animals as well as fish by the coral reefs in Taiwan. The wide range of "nest cams" continuously capturing bird's nests, but also variants filming wolves, badgers, foxes etc. are other important examples. Similarly, multimedia data for pollution monitoring or for documenting and studying adverse weather phenomena and natural disasters are continuously collected.

The automated analysis of such multimedia data presents new challenges, and the results of such analyses are of great interest to investigators such as biologists in their strive towards analyzing the natural environment, promoting its preservation, and understanding the behavior and interactions of the living organisms (insects, animals, etc.) that are part of it.

Topics of interest
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Research topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

· Ecological Multimedia Content Analysis and Processing
· Ecological Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
· Computer Vision for Ecological Video/Image Processing
· Animals and Insects Behavior and Event Understanding
· Video and Signal Based Surveillance of Ecological Sites
· Multimedia Processing for Pollution Monitoring
· Multimedia Analysis for Weather Phenomena and Natural Disasters Understanding
· Participatory and Social Environmental Media Analysis
· Multimedia Systems and Middleware for Ecological Data
· Summarisation, Browsing and Organization of Ecological Content
· Interfaces, Presentation, Integration and Visualization tools for Ecological Data
· Semantic Web Approaches for Ecological Data Sharing and Representation


Important dates
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Deadline for paper submission: June 15, 2012 .
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2012
Camera Ready Paper and Registration: July 31, 2012

Submission
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Submissions to MAED 2012 workshop must include new, unpublished, original research. Papers must be original and have not been published or submitted elsewhere. All papers must be written in English. The submissions will be reviewed in a double-blind procedure by at least three members of the Program Committee. The papers must contain no information identifying the author(s) or their organization(s). Papers should be submitted electronically using the CMT conference management service (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ACMMMWS2012/)The papers must be prepared following the ACM proceedings style (http://www.acmmm12.org/paper-submission-instruction/) and should not exceed the length of 6 pages. For further information visit the web page of the workshop at http://maed2012.dieei.unict.it/.

Extended and peer-reviewed versions of selected papers will be published in a Special Issue of a Top Ranked Multimedia Journal.

Workshop Organizers
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Dr. Concetto Spampinato, University of Catania, Italy
Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH-ITI), Greece
Dr. Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), The Netherlands

Program committee
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Bas Boom (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Carmelo Pino (University of Catania,Italy)
Francesco De Natale (University of Trento, Italy)
Fadi Dornaika (University of San Sebastián, Spain)
Gabriella Sanniti di Baia (CNR, Italy)
Gaya Nadarajan (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Guillaume Gravier (IRISA,France)
Harald Bosch (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Jenny Benois-Pineau (University of Bordeaux, France)
Jessica Chen Burgher (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Kostas Karatzas (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Greece)
Leo Wanner (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Lynda Hartman (CWI -Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Nikolaos Gkalelis (CERTH-ITI, Greece & Imperial College London, UK)
Pietro Hiram Guzzi (University of Calabria, Italy)
Sebastiano Battiato (University of Catania, Italy)
Simone Palazzo (University of Catania, Italy)
Stefanos Vrochidis (CERTH-ITI, Greece & Queen Mary University, UK)
Yiannis Kompatsiaris (CERTH-ITI, Greece)