It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 1st ACM Workshop on Analysis and Retrieval of Events, Actions and Workflows in Video Streams --ACM AREA 2008 which is held this year in Vancouver, Canada. The mission of this workshop is to present the current research advantages in the area of cognitive video supervision and analysis of events, actions and workflows which is a critical research task for many real-life multimedia applications. ACM AREA 2008 gives researchers a unique opportunity to share their perspectives with their colleagues interested in the various aspects of video supervision and event analysis.
The call for papers attracted submissions from Asia, Europe and the United States. The program committee accepted 16 papers that cover a variety of topics. These papers have been organized in four sessions. More specifically, the first session is dedicated to new algorithms and methods for object tracking under complex environments as well as with object labeling/matching techniques. The second session presents the new research outcomes in the area of detecting events, actions and workflows in video sequences. Event-driven analysis of videos is presented in the third session, while the workshop ends with a special session that covers the recent advantages of ongoing research projects in this research field. We hope that these proceedings will serve as a valuable reference for events detection and retrieval in video streams.