Multimedia Group developed the mobile app for iOS for the TEDxThessaloniki event. The application is available for free on iTunes. The app was implemented in the context of SocialSensor in the process of gathering realistic user requirements and feedback for various types of events. Also for testing implementation technologies and approaches towards gathering significant experience for the SocialSensor use case prototypes. TEDx Thessaloniki event offered a unique opportunity since it attracts a large audience familiar with mobile apps and social media usage.

A Java project for community detection and recommendation.

PatMedia was presented and demonstrated to the Greek Industrial Property Organization. The presentation took place at the premises of the Greek Industrial Property Organization and the patent experts, searchers and examiners of the organization, who attended the demonstration of PatMedia, expressed their interest in the multimedia analysis technologies of ITI and their application to the intellectual property domain.

More detailed information and on line demonstration related to PatMedia are available here..

Multimedia Group has released ThessFest, the official iPhone application for the 14th Thessaloniki Documentary Fetival. The application is available for free on iTunes.

ThessFest first version offers the following features:

   -  Browse the updated Film Festival schedule by category and date.
   -  Search movies by keyword.
   -  See details of Festival movies and directors.
   -  Easily create and update your own screening schedule.
   -  Get directions on how to reach the Festival venues.
   -  Easily rate, tweet and comment movies.
   -  See real-time ratings, comments and tweets made by other users for each movie.
   -  Follow the Festival tweet stream.

Future versions will incorporate innovative technologies developed by SocialSensor, including real-time Festival-focused topic and trend monitoring, recommendations for points of interest and activities around the festival venues, link and discuss with like-minded Festival visitors,and 3D browsing of the Festival premises.

The MEDUSA project final review was successfully held between 9-10 February 2012 in Munich, Germany.

The MEDUSA project studies a combination of different types of sensors supporting operations within urban environments. The project analyzes a diverse cross-section of existing imaging sensor technologies including those in the field of video, with specific reference to images on visible and infrared bands. Multimedia Group's contribution to MEDUSA was two-fold, in visual processing algorithms and in the High Level Fusion (HLF) engine of MEDUSA with the development of the reasoning engine. Multimedia Group researched and developed real time algorithms that work on streaming video data for smoke detection and unusual motion detection (see them in action in the videos).

This is an implementation of the Differential Edit Distance (DED) metric, a unidimensional measure that has been developed to evaluate video scenes segmentation results. It compares the scene segmentation results of an automatic scene segmentation system with the ground-truth scene segmentation and estimates their similarity in terms of the number of shots that need to change scene in order to make the two segmentations identical. The software input is two .txt files containing the segmentation under comparison and the output is their distance, which can be also saved or appended in a .txt file. The software can be also used to compare any label strings that correspond to sets of well-ordered objects.

MK Group at CERTH has released an iPhone application for ClustTour. ClustTour mobile enables an intuitive exploration of the interesting landmarks and events for more than 30 cities worldwide, making use of automatic analysis methods on large amounts of tagged photos from Flickr.
The application is available for free on iTunes:
http://clusttour.gr/itunes

The European Commission published an article about WeKnowIt in the Technology Marketplace section of CORDIS website. Yiannis Kompatsiaris was interviewed, revealing the WeKnowIt objectives, the project's course, its results and their impact so far.

Our Group will cooperate with the Thessaloniki International Film Festival aiming to exploit new social media analysis technologies for enhancing experience of the Festival attendants. To this end a Cooperation Agreement has been signed between CERTH-ITI and the Festival. Most of the activities will be in the framework of the SocialSensor project, which is coordinated by CERTH-ITI.

Η ομάδα Πολυμέσων  του ΙΠΤΗΛ θα συνεργαστεί με το Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης με στόχο την αξιοποίηση νέων τεχνολογιών ανάλυσης κοινωνικού περιεχομένου για την παροχή προηγμένων υπηρεσιών στους επισκέπτες του. Για το σκοπό αυτό υπογράφτηκε Μνημόνιο Συνεργασίας μεταξύ του ΙΠΤΗΛ και του Φεστιβάλ. Μεγάλο μέρος των κοινών δράσεων θα υποστηρίζονται από την ερευνητική προσπάθεια στα πλαίσια του έργου SocialSensor, που συντονίζεται από το ΙΠΤΗΛ.

CERTH-ITI participated to the Known-Item Search (KIS) Task of TRECVID 2011 with the interactive video retrieval engine VERGE. VERGE produced the best results, among the submissions made by all institutions participating to TRECVID 2011 KIS task (12 runs from 4 different institutions) with interactive systems. The latest version of VERGE supports advanced retrieval functionalities including visual similarity search, visual concept-based retrieval, user implicit feedback-based fusion, video similarity based on PLSA and full text search. More information about VERGE is available here. Feel free to try on line the latest version of VERGE and search in the TRECVID 2011 KIS test data collection.

Our group participates in two new integrated projects of the Networked Media Unit starting October 1st, SocialSensor - "Sensing User Generated Input for Improved Media Discovery and Experience" and LinkedTV - "Television Linked To The Web".

Invited speech on "Search Computing: Business Areas, Research and Socio-economic Challenges" given by Yiannis Kompatsiaris at the "Search Computing and Social Media" workshop, organized in conjunction with NEM Summit 2011.

WeKnowIt related invited speech on "Extracting Emergent Semantics from Large-Scale User Generated Content" given by Yiannis Kompatsiaris at the ICT Innovations 2011 conference.