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Back from Hack Day London - it was absolutely incredible! I had really great fun, did a lot of hacking/coding all night long!

I worked with Jon Hare, and we went for the augmented reality web service, which was pretty crazy. We made the ARToolKit, which you can see in the video below, into a web service!

Although it’s a little rough around the edges still, you can play with our hack online at: http://multimedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/artheworld

I’ve also posted the slides from our 90 seconds presentation on Slideshare:

On Saturday I presented a guest lecture for a masters course on Medical Informatics at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal.

The title of the lecture was: “The Semantic Web: a Medical Perspective”.

I described the issues surrounding the sharing of data in the medical domain, and how the current web fails to address the needs of users wishing to integrate different data sets. I then introduced the semantic web, but I did it from the perspective of linking data rather than the top-down, formal ontologies and logic route.

Although presenting a full lecture was a new experience for me, I think it went well. I gave the presentation in English rather than try a mixture of rusty Portuguese/English, although looking back now perhaps I should have gone with the Portuguese. It’s so easy to drop in a typical English expressions or word that non-native English speakers won’t have a clue about!

I’ve made the slides for the presentation available here: slides (PDF, 7Mb).

Last week I gave a joint IAM seminar with Jon Hare, as part of the IAM 2006/2007 seminar series.

The seminar was officially called “Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multimedia Information Retrieval: Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches“, although we decided that what we really were talking about was “The Ups and Downs of Image Retrieval”.

It was basically a follow up on the paper we presented at the Mastering the Gap workshop at the European Semantic Web Conference last year.

We described the two basic approaches to image retrieval (semantic-based and content-based) and introduced the issue of the semantic gap in image retrieval, in particular by looking at the user requests to real picture libraries and archives. We then went to describe how semantic web techniques might be used to overcome some of the issues, although it’s challenging when dealing with real archive data. Finally, Jon showed his amazing semantic space technique, which allows users to search collections of unannotated images using text keywords.

The slides are available in PDF (5.7M) and because of the movies/demos we used in the presentation as a Quicktime interactive movie in two sizes: large (118M) and small (13M).

The seminar itself was recored and podcast on the IAM seminar feed, but I don’t think it’s visible outside of ECS. We’ll try to get it put somewhere sensible soon.