ICMR 2012 Awards

• Best Paper Award:
  Title: Linking Visual Concept Detection with Viewer Demographics
  Authors: Adrian Ulges, Markus Koch, Damian Borth
  Abstract:
  The estimation of demographic target groups for web videos­ with applications in ad targeting ­ poses a challenging problem, as the textual description and view statistics available for many clips is extremely sparse. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to link a clip's popularity across different viewer ages and genders on the one hand with the video content on the other: Employing user comments and user profiles on YouTube, we show that there is a strong correlation between demographic target groups and semantic concepts appearing in the video (like "teenage male" and "skateboarding"). Based on this observation, we suggest two approaches: First, the demographic target group of a clip is predicted automatically via a content-based concept detection. Second, should sufficient view statistics already give a good impression of a video's audience, we show that this information can serve as a valuable additional signal to disambiguate concept detection. Our experimental results on a dataset of 14,000 YouTube clips commented by 1 mio. users show that though content-based viewership estimation is a challenging problem suitable demographic groups can be suggested by concept detection. Also, a combination with demographic information as an additional signal leads to relative improvements of concept detection accuracy by 47%.
  
  
• Best Demo Award:
  Title: Cluster-based Photo Browsing and Tagging on the Go
  Authors: Symeon Papadopoulos, Juxhin Bakalli, Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Emmanouil Schoinas
  Abstract:
  We present a technical demonstration of a novel smartphone application that enables efficient browsing and tagging of landmark and event photos. The application employs a hierarchical mode of exploration enabling zooming from the level of a city, through the level of an area/neighbourhood, down to the level of a specific spot. This navigation mechanism combined with photo clustering, and a dual map-list viewing mechanism, enables efficient browsing of hundreds of thousands of publicly available geotagged photos on a smartphone. Due to the large number of markers on the map, an adaptive clustering strategy is employed to reduce clutter on the screen. In addition to the advanced browsing capabilities, the application enables users to import their personal photos from Flickr and to easily annotate them by propagating to them metadata (location, tags) from the currently viewed object (area, landmark). The application currently supports more than 30 cities worldwide.
  
  
• Best Reviewer Award:
  John R. Kender from Columbia University
  ICMR 2012 introduces some forms of recognition for the "best reviewer" of submitted papers. The criteria are that the reviewer should have demonstrated the expertise to provide insightful and knowledgeable feedback, should have provided quality reviews which are helpful to the authors of papers, should have displayed collegiality and constructive feedback, and should have completed reviews on time. The award is selected after examining all of the 400+ reviews from the 101 reviewers.