Objects, actions, exploration and structure

We'll have two talks followed by drinks. Cees Snoek (Qualcomm) talks about what objects tell about actions and Maarten Marx (University of Amsterdam) will talk about exploratory search in structured document collections.

Cees Snoek (Qualcomm) - What objects tell about actions
This talk is about automatic classification and localization of human actions in video. Whereas motion is the key ingredient in moderna pproaches, we assess the benefits of having objects in the video representation. Rather than considering a handful of carefully selected and localized objects, we conduct an empirical study on the benefit of encoding 15,000 object categories for action using 6 datasets totaling more than 200 hours of video and covering 180 action classes. Our key contributions are i) the first in-depth study of encoding objects for actions, ii) we show that objects matter for actions, and are often semantically relevant as well. iii) We establish that actions have object preferences. Rather than using all objects, selection is advantageous for action recognition. iv) We reveal that object-action relations are generic, which allows to transferring these relationships from the one domain to the other. And, v) objects, when combined with motion, improve the state-of-the-art for both action classification andlocalization. This is joint work with Mihir Jain and Jan van Gemert.

Cees Snoek is a principal engineer at Qualcomm Research Netherlands and an associate professor at the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Amsterdam. Previously he was at Carnegie Mellon University, UCBerkeley and Euvision Technologies. His research interests focus on visual recognition and retrieval.

Maarten Marx (University of Amsterdam) - Exploratory search in structured document collections

We show how to employ ElasticSearch to create an exploratory search system for collections of rich semi-structured documents: parliamentary proceedings. These documents invite users to asks complex queries like
> return documents about moslims in which Wilders speaks but where he is not interrupted by Pechtold.
Our goal was to allow such complex queries but still have a fast and scalable system.To achieve this the deeply-nested XML documents were flattened to simple sets of key-value pairs which ElasticSearch can handle efficiently.
We employ ngram-viewer like timelines with incorporated facets, wordcloud summaries, and several ranking options to help users in exploring the material. The system is available at http://search.politicalmashup.nl (http://search.politicalmashup.nl/) and currently contains 1M, 1.7M, and 4M speeches from Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, respectively.

Maarten Marx (1964) obtained his master in political science (1990) and his PhD in mathematical logic (1995), both at the University of Amsterdam. He (co)-authored 3 books and more than 75 scientific articles. Since 2002 his main research topic is XML, in particular XPath dialects. In 2004 he won the ACM Principles of Database Systems best paper award for his Codd-completeness result for "Conditional XPath". His current research interest is integration of large amounts of semi-structured, text-centric, data. His work on the parliamentary proceedings was recognized with the XML Holland Award 2008 and the Dutch Data prize (awarded by DANS-KNAW) 2012.