We are pleased to invite you to the following talk: Rethinking media semantics: acquisition, representation and learnability, by Dr. Hari Sundaram, assistant professor, at Arizona State University, Jointly Organized by Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), and Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA). (The slides are now available for download under "Downloads" Section, please log in to access.)

Seminar Jointly Organized by

Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA)

Title: Rethinking media semantics: acquisition, representation and learnability

Speaker: Dr. Hari Sundaram

Date: 24^th July, 2007 (Tuesday)

Time: 2pm – 3pm

Venue: Meeting Room “BigOne”, I2R

**ADMISSION IS FREE. ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND. REGISTER ON-SITE**
(Light refreshments will be provided)

Abstract:

This talk will examine some assumptions in media semantics under three broad categories - (a) aspects of meaning (b) rethinking semantic construction (c) learnability contradictions. A re-examination of the assumptions behind media semantics is useful, as the mechanisms by which people create and consume media have changed significantly in the last decade. These changes offer fresh insight into the familiar problem of the semantic gap - how to go from sensory data to meaning. There are three aspects of meaning of interest - context, approximations, and variability. We need to examine the construction of meaning in a manner very different from the familiar Marr model - specifically we shall examine embodiment and networked construction. A significant challenge to the learnability of semantics lies in re-examining within the multimedia context, of what Chomsky calls "the poverty of input" problem. How is it possible to learn a large number of concepts with very few / or even non-existent training examples? We will examine the role of context and semantic approximation with an application to media retrieval. The issues of embodiment and its relation to semantics will be discussed with respect to an educational application. We hope to provide a partial answer to the issue of semantic construction and learnability in an application related to social networks.

Biography:

Hari Sundaram is currently an assistant professor, at Arizona State University. This is a joint appointment with the department of Computer science and the Arts Media and Engineering program. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in 2002. He received his MS degree in Electrical Engineering from SUNY Stony Brook 1995 and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1993.

His research group works on developing computational models and systems for situated communication. There are two complementary (but coupled) directions - (a) designing intelligent multimedia environments that exist as part of our physical world (e.g. an intelligent room) (b) developing new algorithms and systems to understand the media artifacts resulting from human activity (e.g. emails, photos / video). Specific projects include - context models for action, resource adaptation, interaction architectures, communication patterns in media sharing social networks, collaborative annotation, as well analysis of online communities.

Prof. Sundaram's research has won several awards - the best student paper award at JCDL 2007, the best ACM Multimedia demo award in 2006. The best student paper award at ACM conference on Multimedia 2002, the 2002 Eliahu I. Jury Award for best Ph.D. dissertation. He has also received a best paper award on video retrieval, from IEEE Trans. On Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, for the year 1998. He is an active participant in the Multimedia community - he is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMCCAP), as well as the IEEE Signal Processing magazine. He has co-organized workshops at acm multimedia on experiential telepresence (ETP 2003, ETP 2004), archival of personal experiences (CARPE 2004, CARPE 2005) and a conference of image and video retrieval (CIVR 2006).