UvA researchers win the Multimedia Grand Challenge 2014
Jan Zahálka, Stevan Rudinac and Marcel Worring from the Informatics Institute won the Grand Challenge 1st prize award at the ACM Multimedia 2014 with their contribution ‘New Yorker Melange: Interactive Brew of Personalized Venue Recommendations’.
New Yorker Melange
When coming to a new city or trying to learn more about it, the visitors face a classic dilemma about what places to visit. Besides conventional guidebooks and television programs, nowadays there are numerous online resources that help with the choice, such as Foursquare, Yelp or TripAdvisor.
While these are excellent when looking for venues enjoying general popularity, they rarely reflect individuality of city's inhabitants and visitors. Understanding user's preference towards a particular venue in the city and the aspects that make two venues similar is a non-trivial task.
Starting from the assumption that those aspects may be naturally encoded in a large-number of venue-related images and metadata hosted on social media sites, the UvA's award-wining submission proposed the New Yorker Melange, an interactive city explorer, which navigates New York venues through the eyes of New Yorkers having a similar taste to the interacting user.
The system introduces a novel way of analysing content originating from very different social media platforms and iteratively learns user preferences through the interaction. Experimental validation of the underlying techniques shows that a true multimodal approach in which text analysis, image analysis, and user interaction are integrated significantly outperforms methods based on a single modality.
About the Competition
Since the founding of ACM SIGMM in 1993, ACM Multimedia has been the worldwide premier conference and a key world event to display scientific achievements and innovative industrial products in the multimedia field. The Multimedia Grand Challenge presents a set of problems and issues from industry leaders, geared to engage the Multimedia research community in solving relevant, interesting and challenging questions about the industry’s 3-5 year vision for multimedia. The Multimedia Grand Challenge was first presented as part of ACM Multimedia 2009 and has established itself as a prestigious competition in the multimedia community. This year’s grand challenges were proposed by IBM, Microsoft, VideoLectures.NET, Technicolor and Huawei. IBM chose “New York City 360º” as their topic of the Grand Challenge for 2014 because of the richness of social media related to NYC. From the 10 finalists, the winners were selected based on quality of demonstration, interestingness, technical contribution, and scalability.