Multimedia semantics: opportunities and challenges

Digital media production and consumption has skyrocketed in recent years and is now commonplace in many parts of our lives - from the way we entertain and inform ourselves to the way we communicate, socialize, and learn. With the tremendous growth of multimedia come great opportunities but even greater expectations and challenges. Traditional approaches of multimedia description based on manual tagging, production metadata, and link analysis are typically coarse-grained and inadequate. Advances in semantic understanding of multimedia content over recent years are instrumental for unlocking the full potential of multimedia. In this talk, I will describe a few case studies of multimedia semantics applications developed at IBM Research to address real world business problems, with emphasis on the key opportunities and challenges for each use case. The goal of this talk will be to raise questions and bring attention to open problems with practical implications, rather than to prescribe specific answers.