Californimedia

After the PLoP we took a jet to Santa Barbara for the ACM-Multimedia conference. What a weather change!! We left Portland raining and Santa Barbara weather seems like the one at Barcelona in July!

It has been a pity because while preparing the CLAM demo we missed most of the talks. Yesterday we received the prize to the best opensource multimedia project for CLAM and today we did the demo having some unrelevant logistic problems. The audience got the rapid prototyping idea very well, as we intended.

I saw few paper presentations. The one left i felt interesting for us was about extracting brush patterns to identify painting style/author. We assisted but, sadly, we were solving some problems with our demo and we couldn't pay the attention the topic required to understand it properly. :-(

Most of the presentations were about video. Nearly none about audio but ours and Peter and Markus' poster. We meet those nice guys at the ISMIR last year. They have done a very nice and impressive work on navigating music collections. Tomorrow the Audio workshop starts, so we'll get our audio meat. ;-)

Being about multimedia you can feel the shadow of two of the most successful phenomena in internet this year: Google Maps and YouTube. A lot of papers were about integrating geographical information with media and social networks.

Xavi, which is very busy with the conference arrangements took us yesterday to the UCSB (the university were he works in). He showed us the Allosphere project which is an impressive multimedia installation that puts you into a interactive 3D world.