Expertise, Impact and Philosophy

 

Research domain and expertise: The members of the MMC group share expertise in (multimedia) information retrieval, recommender systems, multimedia signal processing, social network analysis, graph signal processing, learning on graphs and human computation (crowdsourcing). With this expertise, they address challenges imposed by multimedia data, under which we consider multimodal data collections, where information is contained in or conveyed by modalities including images, video, audio, music, text, and speech, separately or in various combinations. While in the past typically organized in standalone collections on servers and data clouds, multimodal data collections are increasingly connected in networked data structures, enriching the networks of users (items, metadata and user data in social networks), forming distributed data collections (e.g. images on the Web), or steering the information processes in networks and networked systems (e.g., search engines, recommender systems, telecom networks).

Impact domain: The methodological and algorithmic concepts developed by the MMC Group lie at the core of tomorrows’ AI-driven data-analysis and interactive and decision support systems, with special focus on multimodal and cross-modal data analysis, (social) network analysis and modeling frameworks, and search engines and recommender systems. Collaborations have included joint work with researchers from, among others, Yahoo Labs, Facebook, ICSI Berkeley, Telefónica Research, Microsoft Research and Google.

Research philosophy: The research of the group is oriented towards the needs and values of the individual users and service providers, but also takes into account the impact of the discovered methodological and algorithmic concepts on the individual user and the society. This requires such concepts to be effective, but at the same time reliable, trustworthy and socially responsible.