Talk: Practical Apps of Multimedia Search

I gave the Key Note talk at International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval. The talk was “Practical Applications of Multimedia Search�. I have put the presentation – except the live demos and websites that I used in my talk – at
www.ics.uci.edu/~jain/presentation/civr2005.ppt

I enjoyed preparing my thoughts for this talk and presenting it to a group of people who are leaders in image and video retrieval. It was effective in the sense that the message that we need to adopt a new perspective on media search then only we can develop new application was well received. Many people came to me after the talk and discussed about it.

I also tried to communicate that maps are going to provide us a new indexing environment and that is important because it will result in interesting applications. In fact, more one thinks about this, more it becomes clear and exciting what new frontiers are currently being opened because key players like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are going to provide the underlying infra-structure that could be used by developers, both from academia and industry, to build interesting applications using this infrastructure. The most exciting aspects of this development is that it fits in extremely well with emergence of mobile phones and emerging 3G infrastructure.

In preparing for this talk, it also became obvious to me that we need to develop powerful media editing environments urgently to utilize this emerging infrastructure. Just consider the fact that one can now buy for about US$700 a digital video camera that can record mpeg4 movies of 1 hr length on a memory stick. And this will be possible very soon on a phone. The real limitation in podcasting, video-blogging, and event-creation is going to be the ability of edit media. I believe that this is the real bottleneck at this time in making video as a primary medium of communication.