Presentation

About one hundred European universities and research centres have been involved in the last few years in projects funded by EU addressing multimedia data analysis, computer vision and object recognition, multimedia management in large audio and video collections. Presently, two Network of Excellence of the sixth EU Framework Program, namely DELOS and MUSCLE, are addressing these subjects: the former, working in new generations of digital libraries, has a specific work package devoted to audio, video and non traditional objects digital libraries; the latter has many work packages oriented to exploiting machine learning for multimedia data retrieval and for cross-media analysis.

The Summer School on "Multimedia Digital Libraries, Machine learning and cross-modal technologies for access and retrieval" has been jointly organized by those two Networks, and will be held in San Vincenzo, Italy (about 50 Km South of Pisa), from 12 to 17 June 2006.

The aim of the school is to promote advanced experiences and implementations and, more in general, to improve knowledge in these fields. The school will be open to researchers and practitioners who are interested in audio-visual and multimedia digital libraries and in advanced solutions and technologies for their implementation. It will also contribute to establish a common vision of the future ICT technologies for digital libraries, and ultimately will represent a significant opportunity to exchange experiences, to share common problems and to start new joint activities. No specific prerequisites are required, but it is recommended that participants have experience in using information management systems dealing with multimedia data.

Technologies for multimedia digital libraries span over many disciplines: information systems, knowledge representation, computer vision, audio and image processing, compression and storage, machine learning and information retrieval, multimedia data mining, cross-media analysis, user interfaces and interoperability. On these topics, the School program has planned highly qualified lectures given by international researchers, addressing theoretical approaches and practical solutions.