SAMT 2006

The first international conference on Semantics And digital Media Technology (SAMT 2006, http://samt2006.org/) took place at 6-8 December 2006, Athens, Greece, gathering 130 participants. It was hosted by the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens (IVML/NTUA), collaborating with CERTH/ITI.

SAMT targets to narrow the large disparity between low-level descriptors that can be computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media–The Semantic Gap. It addresses integrative research on knowledge, semantics and low-level multimedia processing.

SAMT started out as two workshops, EWIMT 2004 and EWIMT 2005. In 2006 it turned into the full-fledged conference SAMT featuring two workshops, three tutorials, one special session, two poster and demo sessions and the SAMT 2006 industry day. The program also included two invited keynote talks from Alan Smeaton and Guus Schreiber.

In cooperation with the European Commission DG Information Society, the third day of the conference was dedicated to featuring the launch of the 7th Framework ICT Research programme, with a projects poster and demo session and keynote talks EC officers Roberto Cencioni and Luis Rodriguez-Rosello.

There were 68 papers in total submitted to the conference. The selection process was very competitive with only 17 papers (25%) being selected for oral presentation and included in the SAMT 2006 proceedings. Apart from those, 17 more were accepted for poster proceedings without further review. In a second call for posters and demos, 26 more papers were submitted, out of which 19 were selected for poster proceedings.

The SAMT 2006 proceedings were published by Springer as part of the LNCS series, while the poster proceedings will appear online as part of CEUR-WS repository. Two journal special issues are scheduled for publication in 2008, with submission deadline on March 2007.

SAMT 2006 has been held in cooperation with the European Commission, EURASIP, COST 292, the IET and the K-Space network of excellence, with the support of several sponsors. SAMT 2007 will take place in Genova, hosted by IMATI/CNR.