Introduction

Hi all, 

I am Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Senior Researcher at the Informatics and Telematics Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece. Together with my colleagues Sotiris Diplaris and Symeon Papadopoulos, we have been following this list for some time due to its relevance for two European research projects that we are involved, namely WeKnowIt [1], which we coordinate, and GLOCAL [2], where we are partner. 

More specifically, we are interested in the definition/specification of POIs and the Use cases associated with them due to our involvement in research pertaining to the automatic mining of landmarks and events from large collections of user contributed photos [3]. In this context, we have developed ClustTour [4], a prototype for web-based exploration of a city by use of photo clusters (corresponding to landmarks and events) and made publicly available the collection of automatically extracted POIs [5]. Thus, relating to the previous discussions of this list, we are more focused on the COMPUTE use case, since we employ automatic schemes to automatically extract (compute) POIs from large collections of geotagged photos.

We will keep on monitoring the discussions taking place in this list, as well as the content that is created in the respective wiki, and would be happy to contribute our thoughts and experience. 

Best regards,
Yiannis

[1] WeKnowIt - Emerging, Collective Intelligence for personal, organisational and social use
http://www.weknowit.eu/

[2] GLOCAL - Event-based Retrieval of Networked Media
http://www.glocal-project.eu/

[3] S. Papadopoulos, C. Zigkolis, Y. Kompatsiaris, A. Vakali. "Cluster-based Landmark and Event Detection on Tagged Photo Collections". In IEEE Multimedia Magazine (accepted for publication, October 2010)

[4] http://www.clusttour.gr
S. Papadopoulos, C. Zigkolis, S. Kapiris, Y. Kompatsiaris, A. Vakali. "ClustTour: city exploration by use of hybrid photo clustering". In Proceedings of MM '10, the international Conference on Multimedia (Firenze, Italy, October 25 - 29, 2010), ACM, New York, NY, 1617-1620 

[5] ClustTour dataset, http://www.clusttour.gr/?content=dataset

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Dr Yiannis Kompatsiaris
Senior Researcher
Multimedia Knowledge Laboratory, Head
Informatics and Telematics Institute 
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas 
6th km Charilaou-Thermi Road 
P.O. Box 60361, 57001 Thermi-Thessaloniki, Greece
Tel: +30 2311257774, Fax: +30 2310474128
email : ikom@iti.gr WWW : http://mklab.iti.gr
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