KMi Seminars
Synergistic serendipity
This event took place on Monday 12 December 2005 at 12:30

 
Dr. Russell Beale Advanced Interaction Group, School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Modern computers have evolved from the beige box under the desk into an integral part of our environment and infrastructure. They are exceptional tools, offering great power and connectivity and allowing us to achieve things previously unimagined. But they remain a frustrating collaborator: pedantic, almost autistic in behaviour, it is hard get them to work with us in tackling ill-defined problems.

In this talk, I'll discuss a synergistic approach to designing and developing systems that try to bridge this gap by maximising the skills of the user through augmenting them with the capabilities of the computer. I'll discuss a number of examples of systems that have been developed from these principles, including a data mining system which understands that we're simple creatures who can't cope with multidimensional data too easily and like to speak in broad generalisations, and an internet browser that peers into the future for you. I'll also discuss how our interactions with systems have been changing, and how we can get systems to support social interaction, dating, and joke-telling - and why it's important.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Multimedia and Information Systems is...


Multimedia and Information Systems
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 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.

Visit the MMIS website