Mor Naaman will be visiting Amsterdam in the week of 8-11 December. On Tuesday 9 December he will give a talk at CWI, in the Eulerzaal.

Abstract:

The Social Media Opportunity for Mobile Media and Multimedia Search

Social media, or community-contributed collections of media on the web are a becoming a versatile service enabling, at once, new applications and new types of data analysis. In this stitched-together Multimedia Retrieval / mobile HCI talk (a CWI special!), I will first describe
how the availability of image and video on a long-tailed array of topics presents a new opportunity for multimedia search and retrieval -- but also pose new challenges. I will describe some initial exploration into the use of social media together with content analysis to improve search and representation for image and video collections. We apply these methods to generating representative sets of images for location-driven features and landmarks, as well as providing a novel way to access, browse and enhance a different type of multimedia content: live music concert videos.

For the second part of the talk, I will wear my HCI hat and describe ZoneTag and Zurfer, two prototype social media mobile applications. ZoneTag is a mobile client that enables capture, sharing, and community-based "tag suggestions" for cameraphone photographs. Zurfer,
on the other hand, is a context-aware, social, ever-updating, futuristic photo wallet. ZoneTag and Zurfer thus form the basis for a rich personal and social media organization and sharing system. I will describe user studies that investigated user motivations and behavior in these photo sharing systems. With these insights, we can better understand how to design the future of mobile media applications. We may also learn how to solicit better media metadata, and perhaps improve further on the search and retrieval algorithms described above.


Biography:
    
Mor Naaman is an assistant professor at Rutgers University School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. Prior to joining Rutgers, Naaman worked as a research scientist at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, where he led a team of research engineers and interns investigating the future of media: multimedia, mobile media and social media. His domains of interests include mobile and ubiquitous computing, interactive multimedia systems, and location- and context-aware computing. Naaman received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on digital media, and in particular the management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photosthroughout his research career. Naaman is a co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2009's Grand Challenge, served as a co-chair of the JCDL 2008 Program Committee, and is a recipient of two JCDL best paper awards. In previous careers, Naaman was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ. In subsequent careers, he hopes to be a professional backpacker and traveler.