New grand challenge for multimedia information retrieval: bridging the utility gap

The needs and expectations regarding multimedia content access have grown rapidly with the fast development of multimedia technology and the explosion of multimedia content around us. This imposed high demands on the level of sophistication of multimedia information retrieval (MIR) solutions. Although the potential to develop the MIR technology that meets such high demands has also rapidly grown over the years, we are not there yet with adequate solutions. This paper states that a significant step forward could become possible if the MIR field moves towards a utility-centered research focus. There, the criteria related to utility should be deployed to help us bridge the critical remaining gap that is in front of us—the utility gap, the gap between the expected and de facto usefuleness of MIR systems. Utility criteria reach beyond the objective relevance of MIR results to also consider their informativeness and how helpful they are for user’s further actions. Bridging the utility gap can therefore be seen as the next grand challenge in the MIR research field. To pursue this challenge, we propose a utility-by-design approach, by which utility is targeted explicitly and embedded deep in the foundations of MIR solutions. The paper will first motivate this new MIR grand challenge and position it with respect to the current efforts in the field. Then, some possibilities for realizing the utility-by-design approach will be highlighted and translated into a number of recommended research directions.