About Us

Multimedia, Information, Systems, Knowledge, Media, Semantic Web, Information Extraction, Data Mining, Internet, Web, Search
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Welcome to the home of Multimedia and Information Systems Team at the Knowledge Media institute of the Open University and at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. The director of the MMIS team is Prof Stefan Rüger.

Our research is centred around the theme of Multimedia Information Retrieval, ie, Video Search Engines, Image Databases, Spoken Document Retrieval, Music Retrieval, Query Languages and Query Mediation. We are the founding member and administer MMKM (UK Multimedia Knowledge Management Network).

We focus on content-based information retrieval over a wide range of data spanning form unstructured text and unlabelled images over spoken documents and music to videos. This encompasses the modelling of human perception of relevance and similarity, the learning from user actions and the up-to-date presentation of information. Currently we are building a research version of an integrated multimedia information retrieval system MIR to be used as a research prototype. We aim for a system that understands the user's information need and successfully links it to the appropriate information sources, be it a report or a TV news clip. This work is guided by the vision that an automated knowledge extraction system ultimately empowers people making efficient use of information sources without the burden of filing data into specialised databases.

Want to read an article about the work of our group? Here is a multimedia feature of EPSRC newsline, Issue 28, pp 16-17, Winter 2003.