CONFERENCE REPORTICMR 2014: 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia
RetrievalMartin Halvey
University of Strathclyde, UKmartin.halvey@strath.ac.uk

Philip McParlane
University of Glasgow, UK
p.mcparlane.1@research.gla.ac.uk

Joemon M. Jose
University of Glasgow, UK
jj@dcs.gla.ac.uk

Keith van Rijsbergen
University of Glasgow, UK
keith@dcs.gla.ac.uk

Stefan Rueger
The Open University, UK
s.rueger@open.ac.uk

R. Manmatha
University of Massachusetts,Amherst, USAemailsmanmatha@cs.umass.edu

Mohan Kankanhalli
National University of Singapore,
Singaporemohan@comp.nus.edu.sg

1Introduction

ICMR was initially started as a workshop on challenges in image retrieval (in Newcastle in 1998) andlater transformed into the Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) series. In 2011 theCIVR and the ACM Workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval were combined into a single
conference that now forms the ICMR series. The 4th ACM International Conference on Multimedia
Retrieval took place in Glasgow, Scotland, from 1–4 April 2014. This was the largest edition ofICMR to date with approximately 170 attendees from 25 different countries. ICMR is one of thepremier scientific conference for multimedia retrieval held worldwide, with the stated mission “toilluminate the state of the art in multimedia retrieval by bringing together researchers andpractitioners in the field of multimedia retrieval.” According to the Chinese Computing Federation
Conference Ranking (2013), ACM ICMR is the number one multimedia retrieval conference
worldwide and the number four conference in the category of multimedia and graphics. Although
ICMR is about multimedia retrieval, in a wider sense, it is also about automated multimedia
understanding. Much of the work in that area involves the analysis of media on a pixel, voxel, andwavelet level, but it also involves innovative retrieval, visualisation and interaction paradigms
utilising the nature of the multimedia —be it video, images, speech, or more abstract (sensor) data.
The conference aims to promote intellectual exchanges and interactions among scientists, engineers,students, and multimedia researchers in academia as well as industry through various events,
including a keynote talk, oral, special and poster sessions focused on research challenges andsolutions, technical and industrial demonstrations of prototypes, tutorials, research, and an industrial
panel. In the remainder of this report we will summarise the events that took place at the 4th ACM
ICMR conference.

2Venue and Social Program

ICMR took place in Glasgow Scotland. The main conference was situated at the University of
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Glasgow (www.gla.ac.uk) The University of Glasgow was founded in 1451 and is the fourth-oldest
university in the English-speaking world. The workshops and tutorials took place in the School ofComputing Science, with the remainder of the events situated in the Western Infirmary LectureTheatre in the main university campus.
As well as conference activities at the university a number of social events were held in other parts ofthe city. On Tuesday April 1st an optional private tour of the Auchentoshan whisky distillery(http://www.auchentoshan.com/) was organised. This tour allowed attendees to taste one of
Scotland’s most famous export and also learn more about the distillation process. A welcome
reception took place in Glasgow City Chambers in George Square in Glasgow City Centre on
Wednesday April 2nd. This building is the headquarters of Glasgow City Council and is also a fineexample of Victorian architecture. The city council provided the reception as well as a welcome fromthe bailie on behalf of the Lord Provost (Mayor) of Glasgow. The conference dinner took place on
Thursday April 3rd Glasgow Science Centre (http://www.glasgowsciencecentre.org/), located besidethe River Clyde. The attendees were greeted by a bagpiper before a drinks reception where theattendees had an opportunity to try out the museum exhibits. A dinner followed highlighting the bestof Scottish cuisine, including haggis. During the conference dinner the best paper awards werepresented. Photographs from the conference and social events are available online https://www.flickr.com/photos/122120613@N04/

Figure 1: Welcome reception at Glasgow City Chambers

Figure 2: Conference dinner at Glasgow Science Centre

3Tutorials and Workshops

The ICMR 2014 workshops and tutorials took place on Tuesday April 1st 2014. There were 2 tutorials
and 3 workshops, this was the largest number of these types of events at ICMR to date. Over 100
attendees attended the workshops and tutorials.
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The tutorial “Visual Recognition in Large Collections” was delivered by Hervé Jégou, INRIA,France. The tutorial focused on visual recognition in large collections of images, paying particularattention to image descriptions, algorithms for efficient similarity search, complementary techniquesand considering different trade-offs in search. The tutorial “Music Information Retrieval – Theoryand Applications” was delivered by George Tzanetakis, University of Victoria, Canada. This tutorial
provided the theoretical overview of the state-of-the-art in music information retrieval followed by apractical hands-on demonstration of several existing tools and resources that are used for research inthis music information retrieval.
The workshop on Environmental Multimedia Retrieval looked at the need for the development ofadvanced techniques for analysing, interpreting and aggregating environmental data provided in
multimedia formats. The Social Events in Web Multimedia workshop covered the topic of modeling,detection and processing of events; in particular it solicited papers on the latest developments andresults on the discovery of social events from web multimedia content, and on techniques for thedetection and retrieval of media items that are related to such social events. The workshop
proceedings
areavailableonline
http://mklab2.iti.gr/sewm14/wpcontent/uploads/2014/03/SEWM_2014_Proceedings.pdf The Social Multimedia and Storytelling
workshop covered a number of aspects of multimedia retrieval, including content analysis andunderstanding, search and retrieval, HCI, image/video summarisation and visualisation etc. aroundthe area of social multimedia and storytelling. The proceedings of the workshop are available online http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1198/4

Main Technical Program

The main technical program of the conference consisted of a keynote, full research papers, short
research papers, demonstrations and special technical sessions. The conference was opened with akeynote by Prof. Susanne Boll. Prof. Boll is Professor of Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems
in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Oldenburg, in Germany. She also serveson the executive board of the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology, in Oldenburg. The
keynote covered user experience and multimedia content.
In terms of the main content of the conference in recent years multimedia retrieval research has
matured and become a distinct field in its own right and the papers of the main track covered many of
the core topics of the field. For example ICMR 2014 had papers on automated image annotation thatmade use of innovative cross-media models, tackled large classes of images, and utilised socialactivities, all while reporting better image annotation performance than ever before. Events in videos
have also become a focus of attention, and related research explores detecting events in unconstrained
videos and using detected events to support semantic concept discovery. The complexity of thesetasks calls for complex mathematical modeling. ICMR 2014 included papers focusing on dedicatedmethods from machine learning and statistics via graph theory to data mining. ICMR has become thepremier place to present, or discover, new models that make progress for automated multimedia
analysis with a view to improve multimedia search engines. At the other end of the spectrum fromtheory and practice is work that exploits the user and capitalises on intuitive interfaces that allow theexploration of multimedia collections—whether they contain videos, celebrities, 3D models, citizen
science data, or social media TV snippets. Much of this work was shown in short paper and demos atICMR 2014. The full range of topics is illustrated in the Scotland shaped tag cloud in Figure 3.

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Figure 3: Main topics from ICMR 2014 papers, keywords are taken from the abstracts of accepted papers

In terms of numbers, we received 111 valid submissions for the full regular research papers of which
21 were accepted for oral presentation (18.9% acceptance rate) and 21 were accepted for poster
presentation (giving an overall acceptance of 42 papers with 37.8% acceptance rate). For shortpapers, we received 56 submissions, of which 27 were accepted for poster presentation (48.2%acceptance rate). We also had two special sessions Harvesting and Analyzing Live Social Media Data
(5 papers accepted out of 10 submissions) and User-centric Video Search and Hyperlinking (3 papers
accepted out of 9 submissions). The submissions to the special sessions were organised separately by
the special organisers and are not included in the other submission figures above. Further, we had 13
technical demonstrations of systems showcasing key research contributions. The demonstrations andposter presentations were split across two dedicated sessions, these sessions were also accompanied
by a wine and cheese reception to help make the event more social (see Figure 4).
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Figure 4: Poster and demonstration session from the last day of the conference

From the main technical program 4 papers were selected to be considered for the best paper award
and these were presented in a best paper session. The nominated papers were:

Subhabrata Bhattacharya, Felix Yu and Shih-Fu Chang Minimally Needed Evidence forComplex Event Recognition in Unconstrained Videos
Sean Moran and Victor Lavrenko Sparse Kernel Learning for Image Annotation
Lu Jiang, Wei Tong, Deyu Meng and Alex Hauptmann. Towards Efficient Learning of
Optimal Spatial Bag-of-Words Representations
Winn Voravuthikunchai, Bruno Cremilleux and Frederic Jurie. Image re-ranking based on
statistics of frequent patterns

The best paper award was awarded to “Minimally Needed Evidence for Complex Event Recognitionin Unconstrained Videos” by Subhabrata Bhattacharya, Felix Yu and Shih-Fu Chang from Columbia
University USA. The best student paper award was awarded to “Sparse Kernel Learning for Image
Annotation” by Sean Moran and Victor Lavrenko from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

5Industry Day

On Friday, 4th April, the industry day opened with a panel drawn for industry and academia
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discussing the past, present, and future of multimedia retrieval. The panel members were Alberto Del
Bimbo (University of Firenze, Italy), Nicu Sebe (University of Trento, Italy), Hervé Jégou (INRIA,France), Alejandro Jaimes (Yahoo! Research) and Rogerio Ferris (IBM). Following the panel someindustry representatives also gave talks on recent advancement in product, tools, and services.
Chordify’s Bas de Haas showed how music analysis and retrieval can help to play the chords of yourfavourite music song. Rogerio Feris of IBM talked about the latest results in multimedia surveillance
applications; Alexandr Krainov of Yandex, Russia talked about Yandex video retrieval techniques;
Matthew Cooper of FXPAL discussed the over emphasis of quantitative evaluation and interestingaugmented reality; and Pieter van der Linden of Technicolor, the Netherlands, talked about the latest
advances made through the Quaero program.

6Sponsorship and Student Support

ICMR 2014 was generously supported by a number of organisations. FXPAL, Springer and AXES
provided sponsorship for the main conference. The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science
Alliance (SICSA) provided fees for 10 students from Scottish universities to attend ICMR, these fees
were used to cover the costs of student volunteers from 4 Scottish universities. The SICSA HCI
theme sponsored the workshop and tutorial day which allowed attendees from SICSA institutions toattend those events for free. ACM through SIGMM and ACM SIGIR provided sponsorship which
was used to provide 10 travel grants for students travelling from overseas. 36 student travel grantapplications were received, preference was given to students who had work accepted to ICMR 2014
and considerations were also taken to ensure that the grants went to as diverse a group of students aspossible. The welcome reception was provided free of charge by Glasgow City Council.

7Concluding Remarks

ICMR 2014 was highly successful and the largest ICMR event so far, with 170 attendees from 25countries, 42 full papers, 27 short papers, 2 special sessions, 2 tutorials and 3 workshops. The growthof the conference demonstrates the growth of the community and the interest in multimedia
information retrieval. As well as the academic sessions in the conference there were extensive breakout and social sessions to foster discussion amongst the attendees. We are extremely grateful to all of
the attendees and every single person who was involved in the organization of the conference as
without them it would not have been a successful event. ICMR 2015 will take place in Shanghai,
China and promises to be every bit as interesting and exciting as ICMR 2014.

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