International Workshop on Environmental Multimedia Retrieval 2014 (EMR 2014) Stefanos Vrochidis Kostas Karatzas Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Information Technologies Institute Thessaloniki, Greece Thessaloniki, Greece kkara@eng.auth.gr stefanos@iti.gr Ari Karppinen Alexis Joly Finnish Meteorological Institute INRIA Helsinki, Finland Sophia-Antipolis, France Ari.Karppinen@fmi.fi alexis.joly@inria.fr Workshop Title - International Workshop on Environmental recent projects such as PESCaDO1, Pl@ntNet2 and Multimedia Retrieval 2014 (EMR 2014) PASODOBLE3 have dealt with developing innovative services In Conjunction with ACM Conference on Multimedia Retrieval that take into account environmental information and investigated (ICMR) 2014. the extraction, fusion and semantic interpretation of the environmental information encoded in multimedia format such as weather, air quality, pollen forecasts or citizen’s multimedia 1. MOTIVATION records. In this context, recent works in multimedia analysis of The rapid advancements of digital technologies, as well as the environmental data deal with heatmap analysis for forecast data progress and wide availability of digital cameras and sensors have extraction, plant identification, underwater visual data analysis resulted in a great increase of multimedia data production and monitoring of the atmosphere. worldwide. This is also the case for multimedia data that describe The significance and the importance of the analysis and the state of the environment, which include huge amounts of data retrieval of environmental multimedia data is also revealed by the streams from model systems, dedicated stations and amateur recent interest of the multimedia retrieval and environmental sensors, as well as visual environmental information, such as communities, which is reflected by the recently organised heatmaps and forest satellite images. In parallel, the success of workshops (International workshop on Multimedia Analysis on citizen sciences and social networking tools has fostered the Ecological Data in ACM Multimedia 2012 and 2013) and special emergence of large and structured communities of nature sessions (Special Session on Image Processing and Pattern observers (e.g. e-bird, xeno-canto, Tela Botanica, etc.), who Recognition for Ecological Applications in ICIP 2013). started to produce outstanding collections of biodiversity multimedia records. Citizens have become increasingly aware of the important role that environmental data (e.g. weather forecast, 2. AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP air quality, life species distributions) play on health issues (e.g. The recent advancements in digital technologies allow for the allergies), as well as to a variety of other human activities (e.g. generation of large amounts of multimodal environmental data agriculture, trip planning). In addition, such data are very such as meteorological and air quality measurements, as well as important for environmental issues and phenomena, such as the nature observations. Since the monitoring and interpretation of greenhouse effect, the global warming and the climate change. environmental information is critical both for human activities Therefore, there is an increasing need for the development of (e.g. agriculture) and for the sustainability of the planet (e.g. advanced techniques for analyzing, interpreting and aggregating global warming), it is of great interest to research and develop environmental data provided in multimedia formats. This will techniques for the analysis, understanding and retrieval of allow for the generation of reliable measurements, as well as for environmental multimedia. the development of personalised applications that will take into The goal of EMR workshop is threefold. First, the workshop account the state of the environment and the personal health aims at presenting and reporting on the most recent methods for conditions and preferences. In addition, we will be able to the extraction, processing, interpretation, retrieval, fusion and produce more accurate and timely knowledge of other living visualization of environmental information encoded in species, which is essential for a sustainable development of multimedia data with particular attention to personalised services. humanity and for biodiversity conservation. Second, it aims at bringing together practitioners and researchers, Despite the fact that a large number of multimedia analysis both from multimedia and environmental domain, to share ideas techniques has been developed specifically for extracting events and experiences in designing and implementing novel multimedia and behaviours in human-cantered and general purpose analysis techniques and tools for environmental applications. applications, such as sports, movies, surveillance, relatively little attention has been paid to the analysis, retrieval and interpretation 1 of environmental information from multimedia content. Only very http://www.pescado-project.eu/ 2 http://plantnet-project.org/ 3 http://www.myair.eu/ 1 Third, the workshop aims at evaluating the maturity and Kostas Karatzas (kkara@eng.auth.gr) efficiency of the multimedia analysis and processing techniques Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for realistic applications in the environmental domain. Assoc. Professor Kostas Karatzas, Dr.-Eng. holds a Diploma and a Doctor degree in Mechanical Engineering, and leads the 3. WORKSHOP THEMES Informatics Systems and Applications Group at the Dept. of Research topics of interest for this special issue include, but are Mechanical Engineering, where he teaches Informatics, not limited to: Environmental Informatics and Environmental Impact  Analysis and Processing of Environmental Multimedia Assessment. He is also teaching/has taught in various EU  Environmental Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval universities in MSc and seminar level, while he has been a visiting professor for the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI).  Computer Vision for Environmental Video and Image Dr. Karatzas research work focuses mainly in informatics Processing applications and environmental informatics, urban environment  Plant and Animals Identification management and information systems, environmental (&  Multimedia Processing for Pollution Monitoring multimedia) data analysis and forecasting with the aid of  Multimedia Analysis for Weather Phenomena and computational intelligence methods and mathematical models, Natural Disasters Understanding multimedia information content tools, and participatory  Participatory and Social Environmental Media Analysis environmental sensing. Dr. Karatzas has participated in more than  Discovery of Environmental Multimedia Information in 30 European R&D projects, is Member of the International the web Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of CLEEN’s Measurement,  Content Extraction from Environmental Multimedia Monitoring and Environmental Efficiency Assessment (MMEA) Data research programme, a member of the International  Personalised Services based on Environmental Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs) Board Information. of Directors, and an Associate Member of the OGC. He has  Fusion of Multimedia Environmental Information authored approx 200 scientific papers, has been a member of the  Summarization of Environmental Information scientific committee of the many Environmental Informatics and  Interfaces, Presentation and Visualization tools for Computational Intelligence conferences, and has/is supervising a Environmental Data number of PhD and MSc thesis in the area of Environmental  Semantic Web Approaches for Environmental Data Informatics-environmental information analysis and modelling. 4. WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS Ari Karppinen (Ari.Karppinen@fmi.fi) Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) Stefanos Vrochidis (stefanos@iti.gr) Adj. Prof. Ari Karppinen has received his degree of Doctor of Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Information Technology in Applied Physics at the Helsinki University of Technologies Institute Technology in 2001 and was appointed as Adjunct Professor Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis received the Diploma degree in Electrical (Docent) in Physics at the University of Helsinki in 2004. His Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, MSc thesis (1987) dealt with the description and application of a the MSc degree in Radio Frequency Communication Systems system for calculating radiation doses due to long range transport from University of Southampton and the PhD degree in of radioactive releases and his Licentiates’s thesis (1998) studied Electronic Engineering from Queen Mary University of London. the effective choice of NOx – emission control measures. His Currently, he is a Researcher with the Information Technologies doctor’s thesis (2001) dealt with the meteorological pre- Institute. His research interests include semantic multimedia processing and atmospheric dispersion modelling of urban air analysis, indexing and retrieval, search engine and human quality and applications in the Helsinki metropolitan area. He has interactions as well as environmental and security applications. worked as a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Dr. Vrochidis has successfully participated in many European and Institute (FMI) since 1984. His expertise is on mathematical National projects such as PESCaDO and PEOPLE (as modelling, atmospheric physics and chemistry; particularly the subcontractor) dealing with analysis and retrieval of evaluation of urban air quality and exposure and the dispersion of environmental multimedia information. Currently Dr. Vrochidis is pollution from traffic. He is currently leading a research group the Scientific Manager and Deputy Coordinator of FP7 STREP (20 researchers) on Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling. The MULTISENSOR. He has been involved as a co-author in more research group is working on 16 internationally funded (EU, than forty five related scientific journal, conference and book ESA, ESF) and 10 nationally funded research and networking chapter publications. Dr. Vrochidis has served as a reviewer in projects. The key areas of research involve modelling of urban international Journals such as Ecology Informatics, Multimedia air quality and exposure, regional and long-range transport of Tools and Applications and as Technical program committee and pollutants, accidents involving hazardous and radioactive reviewer in well reputed conferences and workshops such as materials and integration of meteorological models and ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Analysis for measurements with the air quality modelling systems. He is the Ecological Data (MAED), European Conference on Information author of more than 270 scientific publications; 61 of these in Retrieval (ECIR), ACM International Conference on Multimedia refereed international journals. He has been working in 19 EU- Retrieval (ICMR) and IEEE International Conference on Image funded projects, including vice-coordinator position in EU project Processing (ICIP). MARQUIS and scientific and technical coordination of recently finished EU/PESCaDO project. 2 Alexis Joly (alexis.joly@inria.fr)  Ioannis Kompatsiaris (Information Technologies INRIA Institute/CERTH, Greece) Alexis Joly is a permanent researcher at INRIA (France), working  Leo Wanner (UPF, Spain) on big multimedia data analysis and image retrieval challenges.  Berrin Yanikoglu (Sabanci University, Turkey) He received his Ph. degree in Computer Science in 2005 in the  Marco Rospocher (FBK, Italy) context of a collaboration with the French Audiovisual Institute  Jaako Kukkonen (FMI, Finland) (INA). He is co-inventor of the INA-Signature technology, which  Alexandra Branzan Albu (Un. of Victoria, Canada) was the first real-world application enabling content-based video  Herve Goeau (INRIA, France) copy detection (2006). In 2007 and 2008, he co-organised CIVR  Juergen Mossgraber (Fraunhofer, Germany) and TRECVID video copy detection evaluation campaigns  Arjen De Vries (CWI, Netherlands) (NIST). He was involved in the steering board of numerous  Vasileios Mezaris (Information Technologies European and French projects related to audio-visual archives, Institute/CERTH, Greece) web user generated contents or biodiversity multimedia data  John Lee (University of Edinburgh, UK) (MUSCLE NoE, VITALAS IP, GLOCAL IP, CHORUS+ CA).  Ioannis Patras (Queen Mary, University of London, He is currently the scientific co-chair of the Pl@ntNet initiative, UK) which released in 2013 a popular image-based iPhone application  Anastasia Moumtzidou (Information Technologies for the identification of plants. Since 2011, he has been co- Institute/CERTH, Greece) organiser of ImageCLEF evaluation campaign through the  Allan Hanbury (Vienna Un. of Technology, Austria) coordination of the plant retrieval task. He is now the main  Thomas Rose (Fraunhofer, Germany) coordinator of a new lab run within CLEF forum and dedicated to  Stephane Marchand-Maillet (University of Geneva, Life Media retrieval (LifeCLEF). He regularly serves on Switzerland) numerous scientific program committees in international journals (PAMI, Trans. on Multimedia, etc.) and conferences (ACM  Kevin McGuiness (Dublin City University, Ireland) Multimedia, ICMR, CLEF, CBMI, ICME, etc.). He is member of  Mikko Kolehmainen (University Of Eastern Finland, the organizing committee of ACM MM 2013 to be hold in Finland) Barcelona.  Herve Glotin (Institut Universitaire de France, France)  Urszula Markowska Kaczmar (Wroclaw University 5. PROGRAM COMMITTEE of Technology, Poland) The program committee of EMR 2014 consisted of the  Markus Stocker (University Of Eastern Finland, following high profile scientists and researchers. Finland)  Concetto Spampinato (University of Catania, Italy) 3