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KMi Seminars
Searching Images to Find Information
This event took place on Friday 12 June 2009 at 11:30

 
Dr. R. Manmatha Dept. of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Image search has a large variety of potential applications. The obvious one is of course searching images given a text query. I discuss research into how this may be done using statistical models (relevance models) to automatically annotate and retrieve images. The same techniques may also be applied to retrieve scanned historical handwritten documents and I will show an example using George Washington's documents. I will then discuss how new techniques for image search may be applied to searching printed documents in languages where good optical character recognizers do not exist. Finally, I will briefly discuss a commercial mobile image search application on the iphone which allows one to take a picture of a book, DVD, CD or videogame cover and get back information such as price, reviews and so on.

Collaborators include Shaolei Feng, C. V. Jawahar, Jiwoon Jeon,
Anand Kumar. Victor Lavrenko and Toni Rath.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.