Undergraduate and researcher team triumph at MediaEval in Barcelona

Jonathon Hare recently returned from the international MediaEval workshop in Barcelona- the concluding meeting of the 2013 international MediaEval multimedia benchmarking challenges on which teams have been working hard on over the last few months.

The team led by Jonathon was up against some of the best multimedia information retrieval and data-mining groups from around the world. Not only did they enter more of the challenges than any of the other teams, of the five challenges entered, they came first in three (social event detection, search diversity and crowdsourcing (working together with Elena Simper and the SOCIAM project of which is the University of Southampton is a founding partner).

Yet the accolades did not stop there, with a team comprised of undergraduates as well as research fellows hard work paid off and they also came second in another challenge (geo-placing) and 4th in the other (search and hyperlinking of video).

Jonathon said, "This was the first year we took part in the MediaEval evaluation, and after a very intense summer working on our entries, it was very pleasing that the performance of our techniques was so good. Our undergraduate interns started with very little practical experience of multimedia analysis, and worked incredibly hard to learn and develop a broad set of techniques to help us achieve the final results."

This was a most impressive set of results and by far the best all round team performance from among the 84 submissions from the 66 teams present. This once again demonstrates the talent that is nurtured across all levels of study in Electronics and Computer Science.

The team was as follows for the placing, hyperlinking, search diversity and event detection tasks: Dr Jonathon Hare (Senior Research Fellow) Dr David Dupplaw (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Sina Samangooei (Research Fellow) Neha Jain (1st year MEng Software Engineering [now in 2nd year]) Jamie Davies (2nd year MEng Computer Science [now in 3rd year]) John Preston (2nd year MEng Computer Science with Mobile and Secure Systems [now in 3rd year])

For the crowdsourcing task: Dr Jonathon Hare (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Elena Simperl (Senior Lecturer) Dr David Dupplaw (Senior Research Fellow) Dr Sina Samangooei (Research Fellow) Maribel Acosta (PhD student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) Anna Weston (just finished BSc Information Technology in Organisations; now iPhD in Web Science)