This week in Yahoo Research Berkeley Brain Jam:

Tamara Berg (Yahoo! Research Berkeley)
Exploiting the Link Between Words and Pictures

Alexander C. Berg (Yahoo! Research Berkeley)
Recent Successes and Failures of Recognition Algorithms in Computer
Vision

Friday, February 23rd, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.
http://upcoming.org/event/152244

NOTE: See previous Feb 23rd post for Tamara's abstract and bio.  Below
is the abstract and bio for Alexander Berg.
-----------------------Abstract------------------------------------
Recognition algorithms in computer vision have come a long way in the
last 10 years. I will describe some of the successes and failures for
recognition algorithms, concentrating on some of our work at Berkeley
including:

- recognizing objects by matching shapes in images
- recognizing actions in video
- recognizing scenes
- indexing large collections of video by content

The talk will cover what might be the short-term future of recognition
algorithms and applications.

-----------------------Bio-----------------------------------------
Alexander Berg is a post-doctoral fellow at Yahoo! Research in
Berkeley, California, and a visiting scholar at the University of
California, Berkeley. Alex earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science at U.C.
Berkeley, and a MA and BA in Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.
His work concentrates on recognition from visual data. More
information can be found at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aberg

--
Upcoming Brain Jams:

02 Mar 2007 - Beth Noveck: Designing Civic Software
                                                             09 Mar
2007 - Jonathan Hull: Video Paper, Multimedia Thumbnails
16 Mar 2007 - Benjamin H. Bratton: Ambient Interfaces - What Pervasive
Computing Can Learn from Architecture

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Yahoo Research Berkeley
http://whyrb.com

Please join us on the 23rd for Tamara Berg's talk.  See you then!

This week in Yahoo Research Berkeley Brain Jam:
Tamara Berg (Yahoo! Research Berkeley)
Exploiting the Link Between Words and Pictures

Friday, February 23rd, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.
http://upcoming.org/event/152244


------------------------Abstract ------------------------
There are billions of photographs with associated text available on the web. Some common areas where images and words are naturally linked include: web pages, captioned photographs, and video with speech or closed captioning. The central challenge that needs to be solved in order to organize these collections effectively is how to extract images in which specified objects are depicted from large pools of pictures with noisy text. This is a very difficult problem because the relationship between words associated with an image and objects depicted within the image is often complex.  My work has demonstrated that for many situations these collections can be mined successfully. I will talk about three projects that I have worked on in this area: Automatically labeling faces in news photographs, classifying images from the web, and ranking iconic images from consumer photo collections. All papers, created datasets, and demos are available on my webpage at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~millert/. 

-----------------------Bio-----------------------------------------
Tamara Berg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yahoo! Research Berkeley. Her research straddles the boundary between Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.  Before coming to Yahoo!, Tamara was a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley and she will be receiving her PhD from there in May of 2007.

--
Upcoming Brain Jams:
 
16 Feb 2007 - Cancelled                                                                                                                                            23 Feb 2007 - Tamara Berg: Exploiting the Link between Words and Pictures                              02 Mar 2007 - Beth Noveck: Designing Civic Software                                                                               09 Mar 2007 - Jonathan Hull: Video Paper, Multimedia Thumbnails

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Yahoo Research Berkeley
http://whyrb.com

Sorry for the late notice. Our speaker is home with the flu, and we
feel like it's better for him (and you) that he'd stay at home.

Other entertainment will be provided in a form of a pre-recorded talk
(should be interesting) if you do show up. Social Jam with snacks and
beer will still happen at 4pm.

Don't forget next week, open house for those of you interested in
summer internships, and the rest of what's coming:
http://upcoming.org/venue/17144/


--- In yrb-bj@yahoogroups.com, "mornaaman" <mornaaman@...> wrote:
>
> (Have you checked out TagMaps <http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com>  yet?)
>
> We will continue with the habit of following Brain Jam with a "Social
> Jam" - an unstructured social time where you can chat and hang out with
> fellow researchers, designers, engineers or friendly dictators.
> Refreshments - and beer - will be served!
>
> (still looking for summer interns, by the way
> <http://yahooresearchberkeley.com/blog/2006/12/22/rock-star-interns/>  -
> come to our open house on Friday 2/2 <http://upcoming.org/event/144080>
> !).
>
> This week in Yahoo Research Berkeley Brain Jam:
> Qingfeng Huang (PARC)
> Spatiotemporal Information Dissemination and Beyond
>
> Friday, Jan 26th, 3pm
> Yahoo! Research Berkeley
> 1950 University Ave., Berkeley.
> http://upcoming.org/event/139116
>
>
> ------------------------Title & Abstract ------------------------
> Spatiotemporal Information Dissemination and Beyond
>
> My exploration of spatial and temporal information dissemination started
> form the observation that a piece of information could have different
> value at different location and time, and just-in-time information
> delivery can be essential in achieving information dissemination
> efficiency.   The exploration resulted with a few new information
> dissemination strategies that gear towards distributed applications that
> handle location and time sensitive data.   A unified theme among the
> approaches is making space and time the first class citizen in
> networking and information dissemination.  In this talk I will start
> from discussion of my past work in this direction in mobile and sensor
> network context,  and discuss potential ramifications beyond the
> networking context (if time permits).
>
> -----------------------Bio-----------------------------------------
> Qingfeng Huang received his D.Sc. degree in Computer Science from
> Washington University in St. Louis in 2003.   He also holds A.M. degree
> in Physics. Dr. Huang has been a research scientist at the Palo Alto
> Research Center (PARC) since 2003 and filed more than 20 patents in the
> last two years. He has also published more than 35 academic papers in
> areas including software engineering, context-aware and mobile
> computing, sensor networks, intelligent transportation systems,
> neuroscience, and quantum physics.  His current research interests
> include algorithms and middleware for transportation networks and sensor
> actuator networks, tools enabling knowledge sharing and harvesting in
> networks (e.g. for healthcare and education), non-invasive
> brain-interface technology and personal sensing, and mechanisms that
> facilitate innovation.
>
> --
>
> Upcoming Brain Jams <http://upcoming.org/venue/17144/> :
>
> 2 Feb 2007 – Y!RB Open House for Summer Internships
> 9 Feb 2007 – Cathy Marshall (Microsoft Research) - Toward adaptive
> services for personal archiving
> 16 Feb 2007 - Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Center) and Rachel
> Hinman (Adaptive Path) - Mobile Web: Design Insights from Consumer Field
> Studies
>
> --
> To get regular (not more often than once a week) Brain Jam
> announcements, please join the yrb-bj mailing list by sending email to
> yrb-bj-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or by visiting the group page at
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yrb-bj/
>
> Yahoo Research Berkeley
> http://whyrb.com
>

NOTICE THE DIFFERENT DAY: BRAIN JAM WILL TAKE PLACE ON FRIDAYS FROM
NOW ON; BRAIN JAM ANNOUNCEMENTS MAY GO OUT LATER IN THE WEEK...

This week in Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to forward):

Bill Scott (Yahoo!)
Designing for AJAX

Friday, Nov 3rd, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

ABSTRACT
With the advent of Ajax, new patterns of interaction have emerged on
the Web. Bill Scott provides insight on how to best take advantage of
the power of Ajax technology for product design through a series of
best practices, summarized as seven key principles. Each principle and
its nuances are illustrated in detail with real world examples and
counter-examples from both inside and outside Yahoo!.

BIO
Bill Scott is Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! where he spreads the goodness
of "rich and sane" Ajax design. Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience
at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax
framework – openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has designed and created
interfaces in a variety of areas (including video games.) His musings
can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.


Upcoming Brain Jams:
10 Nov 2006 - Bjoern Hartmann (Stanford) - Prototypes and Mash-Ups:
Tool Support for Rapid Off-the-Desktop Interaction Design
17 Nov 2006 - Tye Rattenbury (UCB, Y!RB) - TBD;
21 Nov 2006 - Henry Chesbrough (UCB) - Open Business Models

---

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Quite a few of us Yahoo! Research Berkeleyites will be out at ACM MM -
if you're there, look us up.

NOTICE THE DIFFERENT DAY: THIS WEEK'S BRAIN JAM WILL TAKE PLACE ON FRIDAY.

This week in Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to forward):

Bryan Pardo (Northwestern)
Harmonic Source Separation and Query by Humming: New Tools for Music
Information Retrieval and Interaction

Friday, Oct 20th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

ABSTRACT
A key problem facing us in the 21st century is information retrieval
and management - how to retrieve, process, and store the information
one seeks from the huge and ever-growing mass of available data.
Increasingly, the documents of interest are multimedia. Music, from
mp3s to ring tones to digitized scores, is one of the most popular
categories of multimedia. Music collections are typically indexed by
such features as title, composer, and performer. However, people often
wish to perform tasks that require knowledge of their musical content,
such as the melody ("What is the name of that song that goes like this
?") and selection of individual sound sources ("Could you make the
flute part a bit louder in this recording?"). To extend the range of
ways in which audio recordings can be accessed and manipulated,
researchers must create systems that can access and manipulate
perceptually relevant structures in the audio signal. This requires
advances in areas such as audio source separation (picking out a
single sound source from an acoustic mixture), and higher-level
structure identification (labeling a sung melody as "Hey Jude"),
Systems able to reliably access such features would represent a
fundamental improvement in our ability to access and manipulate audio
data, allowing a number of new applications. In this talk, Bryan Pardo
will discuss and demonstrate two interlinked research systems
addressing these issue: the VocalSearch? system for query-by-humming
and the ASE system for automatic separation of sound sources in a
stereo mix to isolate individual instruments.

BIO
Bryan Pardo is an assistant professor in the Northwestern University
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a
courtesy appointment in Northwestern University's School of Music.
Bryan's academic career began at the Ohio State University, where he
received both a B. Mus. in Jazz Composition and a M.Sc. in Computer
Science. After graduation, he spent several years working as a jazz
musician and software developer. As a software developer he worked for
the Speech & Hearing Science Department of Ohio State and for the
statistical software company SPSS. Bryan then attended the University
of Michigan, where he received a M. Mus. in Jazz and Improvisation,
followed by a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Over the years, Bryan has
also been featured on five albums, taught for two years as an adjunct
professor in the Music Department of Madonna University, and worked as
a researcher for General Dynamics on machine learning tasks. When he's
not programming, writing or teaching, he performs on saxophone and
clarinet throughout the Midwest.


---

To get regular (not more often than once a week) Brain Jam
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This week in Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to forward):

Henriette Cramer (University of Amsterdam)
User interaction with recommenders: The influence of transparency on
acceptance and trust

Tuesday, Oct 10th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

ABSTRACT
Recommender systems are rapidly becoming a mainstream feature offered
in a variety of domains, well-known examples including Amazon's
product recommender and Pandora.com's personalized radio stations.
Success of systems like these depends on a successful dialogue between
the system and its users. The system needs to present the user with
quality recommendations and information. It should also persuade users
to provide enough information so the system can learn and improve
these recommendations.

In this talk, findings are reported from a user study that
investigated the influence of system transparency on user trust in and
acceptance of an art recommender system. 60 participants used a
content-based art recommender that recommended artworks on the basis
of individual user ratings of other artworks. Three different versions
of the recommender were evaluated with 20 participants each. Version 1
was not transparent and did not explain why a recommendation had been
made. Version 2 explained why an artwork was recommended ('this has
been recommended because it has the following properties in common
with artworks you like'). The third version stated how sure the system
was of a recommendation ('the system is 75% sure you will like this').
Findings indicate that system transparency influences acceptance of
the recommendations rather than acceptance of the system itself. Even
though transparency is considered important in shaping users'
attitude, transparency was not found to significantly influence users'
trust in the recommender. Information from interviews and observations
offer insight into why explanations improved and certainty ratings
reduced users' trust in the art recommender.

BIO
Henriette Cramer is a PhD-student at the University of Amsterdam's
Human-Computer Studies Lab. She is currently visiting her
thesis-advisor Vanessa Evers at Stanford University.

---

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This week in Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to
forward - and notice the irregular time).


Molly Steenson (Yale)
Mobile Modalities: India's Collective Mobile Phone
Tuesday, Oct 3rd, ***4pm***
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

Molly Steenson will talk about her ethnographic research in Bangalore,
India, on mobile phone sharing in lower and middle class Indian mobile
users. She conducted the study in July-August 2006 while at Microsoft
Research India and discovered that unlike countries like Japan and
Korea, mobile phones are shared in a variety of ways, regardless of
the class. She is especially interested in how urban and domestic
space affects these sharing behaviors.

Bio:
Molly is a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture, where
she is researching historical precedents for responsive environments
in architecture. She was a professor at the Interaction Design
Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where she led the Connected
Communities research group. Molly has worked for a variety of web and
technology companies, including Scient, Razorfish, Phoenix Pop,
Netscape and Reuters, and was the co-founder of Maxi, an award-winning
webzine in the late 90s. Online, she's at girlwonder.com.

---

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Jamming will resume next week.

You may want to check out Hack Day as your alternative activity this
week: http://hackday.org/

See you there!

Mor

We shall resume the Jamming in October.

This Tuesday, Sep 12th, at Y!RB Brain Jam:

David Ayman Shamma (Yahoo Research Berkeley)
Network Arts and Autonomous Expressionism: Defining emotional
interaction in Media Arts

Tuesday, Sep 12th, 3pm
Free & Open to the public
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

Abstract
--------
In a departure from traditional computer science metrics and methods,
I introduce a new framework for building computer systems with an
emphasis on the creation of media art installations. Specifically, I
introduce a framework for autonomous expression, based on Abstract
Expressionism, whose goal optimizes the emotional experience in human
computer interaction. I exemplify this framework through the creation
of several installations which externalize the World Wide Web as a
repository of cultural connections; this is Network Arts. Each
installation uses media (such as movies, television, songs, blogs,
etc.) as its source and directs a performance using salient images and
text found via web search. Together, the development of autonomous
expression and Network Arts provides several new modalities in the
integration of Media Arts with Information Retrieval and Interaction
Design.


---

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announcements, please join the yrb-bj mailing list by sending email to
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This Tuesday, Sep 5th, at Y!RB Brain Jam:

Goix Laurent Walter and Valla Massimo (Telecom Italia)
Context Awareness at Telecom Italia Lab
Tuesday, Sep 5th, 3pm
Free & Open to the public
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

Abstract
--------
The talk will briefly introduce Telecom Italia and present its
research activities, focusing on service personalization and
multimedia tagging. We will also provide an overview of our current
collaborations and partnerships/projects.

Mobilife project (http://www.ist-mobilife.org/)
Laurent's automatic blog:
http://wasvel.blogspot.com/

---

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There will be no talk this week (Tuesday, Aug 30th) - Yahoo! Research
Berkeley's Brain Jam is on a pre-Labor Day break.

Brain Jam will resume on Sep 5th with Valla Massimo and Goix Laurent
Walter from Telecom Italia, speaking about their involvement in the
Mobilife project (http://www.ist-mobilife.org/) - see
http://wasvel.blogspot.com/ for a teaser. More details next week.

Tuesday, Sep 5th, 3pm at Y!RB.


---
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This week in Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to forward).

Ame Elliott (PARC)
Leisure Time in Tokyo: Mobile Phones, Mobile Media, and Mobile Fun
Tuesday, Aug 22nd, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

Abstract
--------
This presentation reports the results of a fieldwork project done in
Tokyo on the leisure practices of young adults. We explored how young
people in Tokyo find out about, plan, coordinate and conduct leisure
outings, and the resources they used to support these practices. Tokyo
youth have a wealth of leisure opportunities and tools to choose from;
they are technologically savvy, and are in the vanguard of those for
whom the new mobile Internet technologies are available. We found that
discovery of leisure options tends to occur serendipitously, often
through personal recommendations from friends and family. For leisure
research and planning, the Internet is the tool of choice, but
accessed via PC, not the mobile phone (or "keitai"), which was
primarily used to communicate and coordinate, not to search for
information. The talk concludes with emerging issues and implications
for the design of mobile leisure activity support technologies.
---

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This week at Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam (feel free to forward).

Elizabeth Goodman (Intel)
`Created by everybody': Engaging participation with mobile interfaces
Tuesday, Aug 15th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.

Abstract
--------
Following Jane Jacobs' oft-quoted praise of cities as places with
`something for everybody...created by everybody,' we can think about
the engagement of ordinary people in public life as a critical
component of functional cities. The question is: can respectful use of
information and communications technologies help them thrive? Thriving
cities generally have governments that fulfill at least citizens'
physical needs; great cities satisfy emotional and psychological needs
as well. If we want to improve the quality of life in struggling
cities, and perhaps even make them great, then fostering well-judged
responsiveness to citizen needs should be one goal of urban technology
initiatives. This talk will explore the potential benefits of
integrating camera phones with more conventional web-based interfaces
in improving the relationship between diverse groups of citizens and
overcommitted city governments.

---

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Next week (Tuesday, Aug 8th) Brain Jam will take a break.

Brain Jam will resume on Aug 15th with Elizabeth Goodman (Intel),
whose talk title is: `Created by everybody': Engaging participation
with mobile interfaces.

Tuesday, Aug 15th, 3pm at Y!RB.

Tuesday, Aug 1st, 3pm, Yahoo! Research Berkeley

Chris Brooks and Nancy Montanez (USF)
Analyzing and Improving the Effectiveness of Tags in the Blogosphere

Tags have recently become very popular as a means for annotating and
indexing online content, due to their ease of use, as well as the
ability to share tags between users. We have been studying the
potential uses of tags, focusing in particular on tagging in the
blogosphere. We will present results showing the effectiveness of
tagging as a mechanism for annotating documents for search tasks, and
then describe techniques for automatically inducing relationships
between tags as a first step to creating a more expressing tagging
scheme. We will end with a demonstration of current work on
automatically recommending tags and visualizing related tags.