Multimedia Content Access

Yesterday I attended a conference on Multimedia Content Access in San Jose. During the conference Simone Santini turned to me and asked whether much of the the research presented there was very similar to the one presented a decade ago or not. And honestly, many papers reminded me of the state of art from a decade ago. People are still using the same data set and incrementally — if at all — refining similar techniques. Very surprising that things have not changed much.

Agreed that the problems are hard. But when problems are hard, you should be more creative and look at the problems in more interesting ways — do some ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking and experiments rather than doing the same thing and hoping for the best. On the lighter side this looks like Hindi movies or soaps — keep doing the same things and keep going to temple hoping that God will change things. Seriously, however, it is disappointing and frustrating to see that people don’t want to solve problems just somehow publish papers.