Springer Releases Book Edited by Jaeyoung Choi and Gerald Friedland

November 18, 2014
Multimodal Location Estimation of Videos and ImagesA book edited by Jaeyoung Choi, a researcher in the Audio and Multimedia Group, and Gerald Friedland, the director of the group, is now available from Springer Publishing. Multimodal Location Estimation of Videos and Images examines methods of automatically estimating the origins of media using multiple modalities, including text in tags, sounds in audio tracks, and visual cues. The book includes chapters co-written by ICSI researchers Luke Gottlieb and Howard Lei in addition to Choi and Friedland.

Multimodal location estimation, a relatively new research area, attempts to make sense of the vast amount of data freely available online. Consumer-produced content such as photos posted to Flickr and videos uploaded to YouTube represent a compendium of data on trends and societal dynamics and evidence of events and phenomena. Multimedia research enables tools to easily organize and search these large collections of social media content and to aid both academic and industry research. The work is also useful for law enforcement organizations, which are often tasked with finding the location of a video.

"I'm excited to be a part of a new field as it grows and coalesces,” said Choi. “And I'm thrilled to be here in Berkeley, at the literal center."

ICSI has been helping shape the field of multimodal location estimation since 2010, the year of the first Placing Task of the MediaEval Multimedia Benchmark. That year, Friedland and Networking and Security researcher Robin Sommer also coined the term cybercasing, the use of geo-tagged photos and videos posted online to mount attacks in the real world. Since then, the research effort at ICSI has grown into its own group, launched in 2013, and Friedland has chaired the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge, in 2011, and served on the editorial board of IEEE Multimedia Magazine. The Teaching Privacy Team, a collaboration between the group and UC Berkeley, has received widespread press for work showing the dangers of posting information online. This year, the group is providing the data for the 2014 MediaEval Placing Task.

The book is available now through Springer.