Originating from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and many other networking sites, the social media shared by users and the associated metadata are collectively known as user generated content (UGC). To analyze UGC and glean insight about user behavior, robust techniques are needed to tackle the huge amount of real-time, multimedia, and multilingual data. Researchers must also know how to assess the social aspects of UGC, such as user relations and influential users. Mining User Generated Content is the first focused effort to compile state-of-the-art research and address future directions of UGC. It explains how to collect, index, and analyze UGC to uncover social trends and user habits. Divided into four parts, the book focuses on the mining and applications of UGC. The first part presents an introduction to this new and exciting topic. Covering the mining of UGC of different medium types, the second part discusses the social annotation of UGC, social network graph construction and community mining, mining of UGC to assist in music retrieval, and the popular but difficult topic of UGC sentiment analysis. The third part describes the mining and searching of various types of UGC, including knowledge extraction, search techniques for UGC content, and a specific study on the analysis and annotation of Japanese blogs. The fourth part on applications explores the use of UGC to support question-answering, information summarization, and recommendations.

With the proliferation of social network services, more and more social users, such as individuals and organizations, are simultaneously involved in multiple social networks for various purposes. In fact, multiple social networks characterize the same social users from different perspectives, and their contexts are usually consistent or complementary rather than independent. Hence, as compared to using information from a single social network, appropriate aggregation of multiple social networks offers us a better way to comprehensively understand the given social users. Learning across multiple social networks brings opportunities to new services and applications as well as new insights on user online behaviors, yet it raises tough challenges: (1) How can we map different social network accounts to the same social users? (2) How can we complete the item-wise and block-wise missing data? (3) How can we leverage the relatedness among sources to strengthen the learning performance? And (4) How can we jointly model the dual-heterogeneities: multiple tasks exist for the given application and each task has various features from multiple sources? These questions have been largely unexplored to date. We noticed this timely opportunity, and in this book we present some state-of-the-art theories and novel practical applications on aggregation of multiple social networks. In particular, we first introduce multi-source dataset construction. We then introduce how to effectively and efficiently complete the item-wise and block-wise missing data, which are caused by the inactive social users in some social networks. We next detail the proposed multi-source mono-task learning model and its application in volunteerism tendency prediction. As a counterpart, we also present a mono-source multi-task learning model and apply it to user interest inference. We seamlessly unify these models with the so-called multi-source multi-task learning, and demonstrate several application scenarios, such as occupation prediction. Finally, we conclude the book and figure out the future research directions in multiple social network learning, including the privacy issues and source complementarity modeling. This is preliminary research on learning from multiple social networks, and we hope it can inspire more active researchers to work on this exciting area. If we have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing use of sophisticated graphics in designing and manufacturing complex architectural and engineering systems; in modeling, simulating and visualizing complicated physical processes; in generating, highly realistic images and animation; and, in most man-machine interfaces. These trends are made possible by the improvement in performance and the lowering of cost of hardware since the mid 1970s, and the continuing advances in many areas of computer graphics. The major advances in computer graphics include: greater sophistication and realism of image generation techniques, improved man-machine interaction techniques, superior geometric modeling techniques for the representation and modeling of complex physical and mathematical objects, sophisticated software systems for animation and modeling of incorporating latest AI and software engineering techniques, greater integration of CAD and CAM in CIM, and techniques to represent and visualize complicated physical processes. These advances are reflected in this present volume either as papers dealing with one particular aspect of research, or as multifaceted studies involving several different areas.

This volume contains the full and short papers of SAMT 2009, the 4th Int- national Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies 2009 held in Graz, Austria. SAMT brings together researchers dealing with a broad range of research topics related to semantic multimedia and a great diversity of application - eas. The current research shows that adding and using semantics of multimedia content is broadening its scope from search and retrieval to the complete media life cycle, from content creation to distribution and consumption, thus lever- ing new possibilities in creating, sharing and reusing multimedia content. While some of the contributions present improvements in automatic analysis and - notation methods, there is increasingly more work dealing with visualization, user interaction and collaboration. We can also observe ongoing standardization activities related to semantic multimedia in both W3C and MPEG, forming a solid basis for a wide adoption. Theconferencereceived41submissionsthisyear, ofwhichtheProgramC- mittee selected 13 full papers for oral presentation and 8 short papers for poster presentation. In addition to the scienti?c papers, the conference program - cluded two invited talks by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Stefan Rug ] er and a demo session showing results from three European projects. The day before the main conference o?ered an industry day with presen- tions and demos that showed the growing importance of semantic technologies in real-world applications as well as the research challenges coming from them."

The two volume set LNCS 4351 and LNCS 4352 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Multimedia Modeling Conference, MMM 2007, held in Singapore in January 2007. Based on rigorous reviewing, the program committee selected 123 carefully revised full papers of the main technical sessions and 33 revised full papers of four special sessions from a total of 392 submissions for presentation in two volumes.

It was our great pleasure to host the 4th International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) at the National University of Singapore on 20 22 July 2005. CIVR aims to provide an international forum for the discussion of research challenges and exchange of ideas among researchers and practitioners in image/video retrieval technologies. It addresses innovative research in the broad ?eld of image and video retrieval. A unique feature of this conference is the high level of participation by researchers from both academia and industry. Another unique feature of CIVR this year was in its format it o?ered both the traditional oral presentation sessions, as well as the short presentation cum poster sessions. The latter provided an informal alternative forum for animated discussions and exchanges of ideas among the participants. We are pleased to note that interest in CIVR has grown over the years. The number of submissions has steadily increased from 82 in 2002, to 119 in 2003, and 125 in 2004. This year, we received 128 submissions from the international communities: with81(63.3%)fromAsiaandAustralia,25(19.5%)fromEurope, and 22 (17.2%) from North America. After a rigorous review process, 20 papers were accepted for oral presentations, and 42 papers were accepted for poster presentations. In addition to the accepted submitted papers, the program also included 4 invited papers, 1 keynote industrial paper, and 4 invited industrial papers. Altogether, we o?ered a diverse and interesting program, addressing the current interests and future trends in this area."