Introduction

Welcome to the Multimedia Scientific Research group, within Telefonica Research (TID), Barcelona. The group, which was created at the end of 2007, focuses on long term research problems relating to Multimedia, Mobility and HCI. Current research areas include multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval, innovative applications and services in mobile phones, ubiquitous computing, context awareness, multimodal user interfaces, activity recognition, emotion recognition, enhanced tele-presence and user modeling. We follow an open research model in collaboration with universities and other research institutions and favor the dissemination of our work both through publications and technology transfer.

The group is led by Nuria Oliver and has a highly multidisciplinary background with a mixture of machine learning, signal processing, HCI, multimodal data analysis, search and mobile computing skills.

Research Areas

• Multimedia Data Analysis, Search and Retrieval

• Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing. Context Awareness. Wearable Physiological Monitoring

• Multimodal User Interfaces. Activity Recognition. Gesture and Emotion Recognition.

• Recommender Systems, Social Networks, User Modeling.

People

News

• Program co-chairs for MIR 2010
• Best paper award nomination for MobileHCI 2009
• We are organizing Recsys 2010 in Barcelona

Careers

We are hiring!! We have intern, postdoc, researcher and visiting professor positions in the areas of multimedia data analysis, search and retrieval; mobile and ubiquitous computing; and HCI. Interested candidates, please, email  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

Recent Publications

• “Rate it Again: Increasing Recommendation Accuracy by User Re-rating”, X. Amatriain, J.M. Pujol, N. Tintarev& N. Oliver, RecSys’09
• CHERUBINI, M.; OLIVEIRA, R.; OLIVER, N. M. Understanding Near-Duplicate Videos: A User-Centric Approach. Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM).Beijing, China: ACM Press, 2009.
• OBRADOR, P.; ANGUERA, X.; OLIVEIRA, R.; OLIVER, N. M. The Role of Tags and Image Aesthetics in Social Image Search. Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Multimedia, Workshop on Social Media (ACM MM). Beijing, China: ACM Press, 2009.
  
• OLIVEIRA, R.; CHERUBINI, M.; OLIVER, N. M. Human Perception of Near-Duplicate Videos. Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact). Uppsala, Sweden: T. Gross et al. (Eds.): INTERACT 2009, Springer LNCS 5727, Part II,
  pp. 21–24, 2009.
  
• CHERUBINI, M.; ANGUERA, X.; OLIVER, N. M.; OLIVEIRA, R. Text versus Speech: A Comparison of Tagging Input Modalities for Camera Phones. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI). Bonn, Germany: ACM Press, 2009. Best paper award nominee.
• CHERUBINI, M.; OLIVEIRA, R.; OLIVER, N. M. Shopping Uncertainties in a Mobile and Social Context. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive). Nara, Japan: IEEE Computing, 2009.
• Cherubini, M., and Oliver, N. A refined experience sampling method to capture mobile user experience. In Presented at the Int’l Workshop of Mobile UX Researchpart of CHI’2009
• “Audio-based soccer game summarization”, Helenca Duxans, Xavier Angueraand David Conejero, BMSB 2009
• “Audio-based automatic management of TV commercials”, Helenca Duxans, David Conejero and Xavier Anguera, ICASSP 2009
• Obrador, P., and Moroney, N., “Automatic Image Selection by means of a Hierarchical Scalable Collection Representation", Proceedings of the SPIE, San Jose, Ca, 2009.
• Obrador, P., and Moroney, N., "Low Level Features for Image Appeal Measurement", Proceedings of the SPIE, San Jose, Ca, 2009.
• “Towards Time-Dependant Recommendation based on Implicit Feedback”, L. Baltrunas, X. Amatriain in CARS (Context-aware Recommender Systems Workshop @Recsys09)
• "Collaborative Filtering With Adaptive Information Sources“ N. Lathia, X. Amatriain, J.M. Pujol(2009), in The 7th Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization & Recommender Systems Held in conjunction with JCAI-09.
• "The Wisdom of the Few: A Collaborative Filtering Approach Based on Expert Opinions from the Web“ X. Amatriain, N. Lathia, J.M. Pujol, H. Kwak, N. Oliver (2009), in SIGIR 09.
  
• "I like It... I like It Not: Measuring Users Ratings Noise in Recommender Systems“ X. Amatriain, J.M. Pujol, N. Oliver (2009, in UMAP 09.
• "Combining multi-level audio descriptors via web identification and aggregation“, Wang J., Amatriain, X., Garcia D. in WWW 09
• “A Timeliness Approach to Synchronous Dataflowsfor Callback-based Multimedia Systems”, P. Arumi, X. Amatriain in Sixteenth Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference (MMCN'09)
• "The Allosphere: An Immersive Multimedia Instrument for Scientific Data Discovery and Artistic Exploration“, Amatriain X., Kuchera-Morin J. , HollererT. , Pope S.T. IEEE Multimedia Journal.
• K. Church, B. Smyth and N. Oliver. “Visual Interfaces for Improved Mobile Search” In Workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web (2009), part of IUI 2009

Present Interns

• Ludwig Schmidt-Hackenberg –TU Ilmenau, Image organization, similarity & aesthetics

Recent Visitors

• Joseph Konstan (Univ. of Minnesota)
• Robin Burke (De Paul Univ.)
  
• Nicolas Georganas (Univ. of Ottawa)
  
• Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research, USA)
• Oscar Murillo (Microsoft Research, USA)
• Prof. Gerri Sinclair (GNWC)
• Prof. J. Konstan(Univ. Minnesota)
• Dr. F. de la Torre (CMU)
• Prof. A. Hertzmann (Univ. Toronto)
• Dr. C. Hernandez (Toyota Research)
• Dr. R. Navarro (Barcelona Media)
• Dr. D. Donato(Yahoo! Research)
• Prof. N. Georganas(Univ. Ottawa)
• Dr. D. Quercia (UCL)
• T. Horanont(Univ. Tokyo)
• Dr. M. Gonzalez (Northeastern University & MIT)
• Prof. S. Brewster(Univ. Glasglow)
• Dr. N. Diakopoulus (Georgia Tech)
• Dr. F. Estrada (Univ. Toronto)
• L. Barrington (Univ. California San Diego)
• J. Lester (Univ. Washington)
• Dr. J. San Pedro (Sheffield Univ.)
• Prof. R. Burke (Univ. de Paul)
• Dr. N. Eagle(Santa Fe Institute & MIT)
• Dr. P. de Meo(Univ. Reggio Calabria)
• Dr. A. Karatzoglou(INSA)
• J. Iria (Univ. Sheffield)
• Prof. L. Barabasi(Northeastern Univ.)
• O. Celma(BMAT)
• Roelof van Zwol (Yahoo! Research)
  

Former Interns/Collaborators

• Jon Froehlich, Univ. of Washington, Urban Computing
• Neal Lathia (UCL)
• Haewoon Kwak (KAIST) 
• Fernando Ramos (Cambridge Univ.)
• AnushMoorty–Univ. Texas, Video quality & aesthetics
• Rob McCrae –Queen Mary, MuViSync
• Eve Hoggan-U. of Glasgow, MobiMood
• Alejandro Gutierrez, U. Illinois, Multimedia organization, social networks
• MengxiaoZhu –Northwestern Univ., Complex network analysis, urban computing
• Jason Chang –GNWC (Vancouver), The TimeBomb
• Jun Wang –Beijing Academy of Science, FastMatch
• Jae-wook Ahn –U. Pittsburgh, Personalization, Recsys
• Linas Baltrunas –U. Bolzano, Recommender Systems