Keynote Speakers
We are very pleased to announce a number of world-class keynote speakers for IIMSS-08. The speakers and the titles of their talks are shown below.
Mike Christel
Carengie Mellon University, USAAmplifying Video Information-Seeking Success through Rich, Exploratory Interfaces
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Alfred Kobsa,
Donald Bren School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USAPrivacy-Enhanced Personalization
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Paul Brna
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UKNarrative Interactive Multimedia Learning Environments: Achievements and Challenges
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Germano Resconi
Catholic University in Brescia, ItalyMorphic Computing
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Mike Christel
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USAAmplifying Video Information-Seeking Success through Rich, Exploratory Interfaces
Abstract:
Years of international participation and collaboration in TRECVID have shown that interactive multimedia systems, those with a user in the search loop, have consistently outperformed fully automated systems. Interface capabilities like querying by text, by image, and by semantic concept have led to significant performance improvements on provided search tasks. The talk will begin with a summary of TRECVID studies conducted with various user groups and the lessons learned for shot-based video retrieval. In the real world, however, video collection users may focus on story threads instead of shots, or may not be provided with a clear stated search task. The talk will continue into a discussion of users facing situations where they lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries and having a genuine need for exploratory search systems supporting serendipitous browsing. Interfaces promoting various views for navigating complex information spaces can help with exploratory search and investigation into video corpora ranging from documentaries to broadcast news to oral histories. Work will be presented using The HistoryMakers oral history archive as well as TRECVID international broadcast news to discuss the utility of various query and presentation mechanisms emphasizing people, time, location, and visual attributes. Opportunities for improving the intelligence of the interface through user and task profiling will be discussed as well, with a series of user studies referenced throughout the talk as empirical data in support of the presented conclusions.
Biography:
Mike Christel has worked at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, since 1987, first with the Software Engineering Institute and since 1997 as a Senior Systems Scientist in the School of Computer Science. He is a founding member of the Informedia research team at Carnegie Mellon University designing, deploying, and evaluating video analysis and retrieval systems for use in education, health care, humanities research, and situation analysis. His research interests focus on the convergence of multimedia processing, information visualization, and digital library research. He has published over 50 conference and journal papers in related areas, serves on the Program Committee for various multimedia and digital library IEEE-CS and ACM conferences, and is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He has worked with digital video since its inception in 1987 and received his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 1991, with his thesis examining digital video interfaces for software engineering training. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics and computer science from Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, in 1983.
Alfred Kobsa
Donald Bren School of Computer and Information Sciences, University of California, Irvine, USAPrivacy-Enhanced Personalization
Abstract:
Personalized interaction with computer systems can be at odds with privacy since it necessitates the collection of considerable amounts of personal data. Numerous consumer surveys revealed that computer users are very concerned about their privacy online. The collection of personal data is also subject to legal regulations in many countries and states. This talk presents work in the area of Privacy-Enhanced Personalization that aims at reconciling personalization with privacy through suitable human-computer interaction strategies and privacy-enhancing technologies.
Biography:
Alfred Kobsa is a Professor in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Irvine. Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Essen, Germany. Dr Kobsa's research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, editorial board member of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), World-Wide Web, and Universal Access in the Information Society, and was the founding president of User Modeling Inc. Dr. Kobsa edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation. He also co-founded a national workshop series and an international conference series in these areas.
Home page : .. http://www.ics.ici.edu/~kobsa ..
Paul Brna
University of Glasgow, Scotland, UKNarrative Interactive Multimedia Learning Environments: Achievements and Challenges
Abstract:
The promise of Narrative Interactive Learning Environments is that, somehow, the various notions of narrative can be harnessed to support learning in a manner that adds significantly to the effectiveness of learning environments. This talk will review what has been achieved, and seek to identify the most productive paths along which researchers need to travel if we are to make the most of the insights that are currently available to us.
Biography:
Professor Paul Brna has a strong interest in the use of narrative to promote learning. He organised the first four Narrative and Interactive Learning Environment (NILE) conferences. He co-ordinated the EPSRC/ AHRC funded research network, DAPPPLE, on "Drama and Performance in Pleasurable Personal Learning Environments" and this network continues to be active. He is now an educational consultant in the area of technology enhanced learning. He was, until very recently, the Director of The Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) Centre, the model for many related research centres around the world. Prior to moving to SCRE, he was Director of Research Strategy in the School of Informatics at Northumbria University and, before that, Director of the Computer Based Learning Unit at Leeds University. He obtained his PhD in Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, the University of Edinburgh. He is Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education and on the management board of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.
Germano Resconi
Catholic University in Brescia, ItalyMorphic Computing
Abstract:
We introduce a new type of computation, called "Morphic Computing". Morphic Computing is based on Field Theory and more specifically on the Theory of Morphic Fields. Morphic Fields were first introduced in 1981 by Rupert Sheldrake based on his hypothesis of formative causation which makes use of the older notion of Morphogenetic Fields. Rupert Sheldrake developed his famous theory, called Morphic Resonance, on the basis of the work by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Morphic Fields are a subset of Morphogenetic Fields and have been in the center of controversy for many years among mainstream science. We claim that Morphic Computing is a natural extension of Holographic Computation, Quantum Computation, Soft Computing, and DNA computing. All forms of natural computation bonded by the Turing Machine can be formalised and extended by our new type of computation model, namely Morphic Computing. We introduce the basis for our new Computing paradigm – Morphic Computing - and its extensions such as Quantum Logic and Entanglement in Morphic Computing, Morphic Systems and Morphic System of Systems (M-SOS). We also present such applications of morphic computing in the field of computation as Morphogenetic Fields in Neural Networks and Morphic Computing, Morphic Fields and Web Search, Morphic Computing and Agents, and Fuzzy Morphic Computing.
Biography:
Germano Resconi is professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the Catholic University in Brescia, Italy. He received his degree in physics from the University of Milano in 1968. His research interests have led him to participate in a variety of activities, both in theoretical and applied studies. In 1983, he was invited by the National Advance School in Paris to work on the application of mathematical logic to the theory of dynamical systems. In 1986, he wrote a paper (with Dr. Maurice Jessel) on “A General System Logical Theory (GSLT)” which established a new logic approach to computer science, artificial intelligence and cybernetics by an extension of the general system theory. In 1991 and 1994, he was invited at the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Science in Irkutsk to present the GSLT work. In 1995, he was also invited at the Academy of Science in Moscow to present the GSLT theory. G. Resconi extended the General Relativity in a way to combine general relativity and quantum phenomena. On the same physical application, he was invited to present a lecture in the Beijing high energy institute and the physics department. Application of the GSLT in robotics are realised at the engineering school of the Catholic University in Brescia, Italy. From 1990 to 1995, Prof.G. Resconi and Prof. G. Klir authored several papers on the Hierarchical meta-theory of uncertainty based upon modal logic. In these works, several approaches to fuzzy theory were unified into a single theory. G. Resconi was invited in 1998 to present his meta-theory in Japan and in Vietnam. He was also invited to the Physics and Electronic Laboratory (TNO) in Netherlands to present a new architecture based on the non-euclidean geometry in n-dimensional space for neural network denoted Morphogenetic Neuron. B.Turksen invited G.Resconi in Turkey to present the agent approach to fuzzy logic. Recently G.Resconi wrote a book with the title Intelligent Agents printed by Springer editor in Heidelberg. G.Resconi wrote many papers on fuzzy logic, neural networks, agent theory, general relativity, system theory, robotics, quantum mechanics, evidence theory, and meta-theories of uncertainty. Recently, while visiting with Professor Masoud at the University of California at Berkeley he began to define the Morphic Computing.
