Patent Document ID: 20110072012
Application ID: 12710783
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for information seeking in a multimedia collection of objects comprising: through a graphical user interface, providing for a user to select a subset of objects from a multimedia collection, at least some of the objects in the collection comprising first and second modalities; displaying representations of objects in the subset on a local map; at each of a plurality of iterations: providing for the user to annotate a modality of an object represented in the local map with a relevance label, whereby an object's first modality and second modality are able to be labeled independently; optionally, providing for the user to select at least one of the first and second modalities; optionally, providing for the user to select a forgetting factor for at least one of the first and second modalities; optionally, providing for the user to select a locality factor for at least one annotated object; with a computer processor, computing relevance scores for unlabeled objects in the collection, each relevance score taking into account labels applied to other objects, computed similarity measures between the unlabeled object and the other objects in the collection, and optionally, at least one of: the user selected at least one modality, the locality factor; and the forgetting factor, the forgetting factor affecting a weight applied to at least some of the labeled objects based on the iteration in which the label was applied; modifying the local map based on the computed relevance scores; and displaying the modified local map on a visual display.