This is a scratchpad … will fill the rest when I have time.
Papers
I really enjoyed the work from Heng Liu, Tao Mei et. al. “Finding Perfect Rendezvous On the Go: Accurate Mobile Visual Localization and Its Applications to Routing”. They combine existing research in a very interesting mixture. They use a visual localization method based on bundler to detect where in the city a mobile phone user is. The application scenario I liked best was their collaborative localization for rendezvous :)
The best paper award went to Zhi Wang, Lifeng Sun, Xiangwen Chen, Wenwu Zhu, Jiangchuan Liu, Minghua Chen and Shiqiang Yang for “Propagation-Based Social-Aware Replication for Social Video Contents”. They use the contacts mined over social networking to replicate content for better streaming and content distribution. The presentation was great, the research solid, still it’s not a topic I’m very interested in. However, for content providers it seems very useful.
Shih-Yao Lin et. al. presented a system to recognize the users motion using the kinect and imitate them via a marionette in “Action Recognition for Human-Marionette Interaction”. I hoped to get more information about the interactions between users and marionettes, still very stylish presentation and artsy topic.
Hamdi Dibeklioglu et. al. showed how to infer the age of a person when they are simling in “A Smile Can Reveal Your Age: Enabling Facial Dynamics in Age Estimation”. I find fascinating to hear about small cues that can tell a lot about a person or a situation.
Fascinating work by Victoria Yanulevskaya et. al. (“In the Eye of the Beholder: Employing Statistical Analysis and Eye Tracking for Analyzing Abstract Paintings”). They link the emotional impact of a painting to the eye movements of the observer. Very interesting and in line with my current focus. I wonder if also expertise etc. can be recognized using sensors.
Another very art focused paper I enjoyed was “Dinner of Luciérnaga-An interactive Play with iPhone App in Theater” by Yu-Chuan Tseng. Theater visitors can interact with the play using their smart phone (getting also feedback on the device ….).
Posters, Demos, Competitions
The winner of the Multimedia Grand Challenge was very well deserved. “Analysis of Dance Movements using Gaussian Processes” by Antoine Liutkus et. al. decomposed dance moves using Gaussian processes in movements with slow periodicity, high periodicity and moves that happened just once. Fascinating and applicable to so many fields … :)
A very neat demo was presented by Wei Zhang et. al.: “FashionAsk: Pushing Community Answers to Your Fingertips”.
Other Notes
As expected from any conference in Japan :), the organisation was flawless. In case any if the organisers is reading this. Thanks again. Nara is a perfect place for a venue like this (deer, world heritage sites, good food …).
More curiously, although there was a lot of talk about social media and some lively discussions on twitter, I seemed to be the only participant on ADN at least posting with hashtag.