Workshop on the evaluation of multimedia retrieval

The evaluation of multimedia retrieval is a subject that has gained momentum in the last couple of years. CWI, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, organised a workshop organised on the subject on 24 November 2004. The main aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of multimedia retrieval to discuss the area of multimedia in general and methodology for evaluation within this area in particular. The workshop, organised by Franciska de Jong (Utwente/TNO, NL), Arjen de Vries (CWI, NL) and Thijs Westerveld (CWI, NL) was an informal half-day meeting without papers or proceedings. Because the workshop was co-located with Thijs Westerveld's PhD defence, we were able to invite Alex Hauptmann (CMU, PA, USA) to give a talk. In total six speakers were invited to present their work related to the evaluation of multimedia retrieval. The workshop started with a talk presenting multimedia retrieval in practise. Then, three talks discussed experiments in the laboratory context of the TRECVID video retrieval benchmark. The afternoon ended with a presentation of a study of interactive experiments and a talk discussing metrics for measuring multimedia retrieval effectiveness.