Keynote Speakers:

The MIR 2007 will feature two keynote speakers:

• Michael Lesk
  Professor, Rutgers University, and Chair, Department of Library and Information Science
  
  Managing 3D: Our Next Problem
  Museums in the world contain billions of objects (the Smithsonian alone has some 250 million things). Three-dimensional scanning is now cheap, and we can expect to see a flood of scanned solid objects join the even more numerous images and videos that we now have. Although we haven't yet solved the problems of managing two- dimensional scanned images, we're about to face the more complex problem of 3-D objects.
  
  Biography: After receiving the PhD degree in Chemical Physics in 1969, Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories, where he worked until 1984. From 1984 to 1995 he managed the computer science research group at Bellcore, then joined the National Science Foundation as head of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, and since 2003 has been Professor (and now Chair) of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, received the Flame award from the Usenix association, and in 2005 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
  
  
• Arnold Smeulders
  Professor, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  
  Semantic Search
  We review the state of the art in content-based exploration of large sets of image and video data. The key to any current approach is features to which still many new additions have been made in the last five years). We discuss image features on a global, regional, and key point level employing stochastic textures derived from natural image statistics and Gaussian color invariant feature sets [Geusebroek 2006]. Features evolving from analysis moving images are still under the largest evolution. In this topic we will discuss several advances towards robust and long term tracking [Nguyen 2005, Nguyen 2006, Burghouts 2006]. Then we move on to review the state of the art in retrieval systems as it has evolved since the end of the early years in 2000. We do so on the basis of the components and evaluation of our video search engine. The MediaMill system performed well in the TRECvid competition in the years 2004 to 2006 [Snoek 2006] and provide a perspective the future of search engines.
  
  1. Hieu Tat Nguyen and Arnold W. M. Smeulders: Multiple target tracking by incremental probabilistic PCA, IEEE trans PAMI 29-1, 52 64, 2007.
  2. Hieu Tat Nguyen and Arnold W. M. Smeulders: Robust tracking using foreground-background texture discrimination, IJCV, 68-3, 277 - 294, 2006.
  3. Jan C. van Gemert, Jan-Mark Geusebroek, Cor J. Veenman, Cees G. M. Snoek Arnold W. M. Smeulders: Robust Scene Categorization by Learning Image Statistics in Context, SLAM06.
  4. Cees G. M. Snoek, Marcel Worring, Jan-Mark Geusebroek, Dennis C. Koelma, Frank J. Seinstra and Arnold W.M. Smeulders: The Semantic Pathfinder: Using an Authoring Metaphor for Generic Multimedia Indexing, IEEE trans PAMI, 28-10, 1678-1689, 2006.
     Gert Jan Burghouts and Jan Mark Geusebroek: Quasi-periodic spatiotemporal filtering. IEEE trans IP, 15-6, 1572-1582, 2006.
  
  Biography: Arnold Smeulders received an M.Sc from the Technical University of Delft in physics in 1977, and in 1983, a PhD from the medical faculty of Leiden University on the topic of visual pattern analysis. Subsequently, he was associated professor in medical image analysis at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 1989, he moved to the University of Amsterdam to become associate professor of computer science and full professor in biological image processing. Since 1994, he has been full professor in multimedia information analysis at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. In 1987, he received a Fulbright grant for a visiting associate professorship at Yale University. He was visiting professor at the City University Hong Kong and ETL Tsukuba Japan. He was associated editor of the IEEE transactions PAMI as well as Cytometry.