Take the Yahoo! Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2009

Between Yahoo! Image Search and Video Search, we have a long and rich experience in providing search solutions for multimedia content on the web. Along the way we’ve made a list of challenges we want to tackle in order to provide a more engaging user experience. We want to open this opportunity to the best minds in the research community to shape the next generation of multimedia search.

So today we are announcing two exciting grand challenge problems for the Association for Computing Machinery’s ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge. This competition invites researcher to submit solutions to these challenge problems for an opportunity to present at ACM’s 2009 conference in Beijing.

Yahoo!’s two challenges in a nutshell:

1. Image search challenge: Develop a robust way of understanding user intent from a given query and generate highly relevant image clusters that match with the intent so that more images can be surfaced to searchers. We are also looking for interesting presentation methods that will help searchers navigate these image clusters easily.

2. Video search challenge: Develop methods, techniques, and algorithms to automatically generate narrative themes for a given video, as well as present the content in an easy-to-consume manner to video search users.

See the full problem statements from Yahoo! at ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009.

We hope you will participate and let us know what you think are some of the key challenges facing multimedia search.

Anja Krombholz – Lead Designer, Multimedia Search
Kaushal Kurapati – Director, Product Management