Barbara Caputo - Böcker

The pervasive creation and consumption of content, especially visual content, is ingrained into our modern world. We’re constantly consuming visual media content, in printed form and in digital form, in work and in leisure pursuits. Like our cave– man forefathers, we use pictures to record things which are of importance to us as memory cues for the future, but nowadays we also use pictures and images to document processes; we use them in engineering, in art, in science, in medicine, in entertainment and we also use images in advertising. Moreover, when images are in digital format, either scanned from an analogue format or more often than not born digital, we can use the power of our computing and networking to exploit images to great effect. Most of the technical problems associated with creating, compressing, storing, transmitting, rendering and protecting image data are already solved. We use - cepted standards and have tremendous infrastructure and the only outstanding ch- lenges, apart from managing the scale issues associated with growth, are to do with locating images. That involves analysing them to determine their content, clas- fying them into related groupings, and searching for images. To overcome these challenges we currently rely on image metadata, the description of the images, - ther captured automatically at creation time or manually added afterwards.

The tenth campaign of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) for European languages was held from January to September 2009. There were eight main eval- tion tracks in CLEF 2009 plus a pilot task. The aim, as usual, was to test the perfo- ance of a wide range of multilingual information access (MLIA) systems or system components. This year, about 150 groups, mainly but not only from academia, reg- tered to participate in the campaign. Most of the groups were from Europe but there was also a good contingent from North America and Asia. The results were presented at a two-and-a-half day workshop held in Corfu, Greece, September 30 to October 2, 2009, in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries. The workshop, attended by 160 researchers and system developers, provided the opportunity for all the groups that had participated in the evaluation campaign to get together, compare approaches and exchange ideas.