New! The deadline for submission to the special issue of IEEE CG&A on Multimedia Analytics has been extended to JANUARY 27, 2010. Video Analytics Workshop at IEEE VisWeek 2009 The Video Analytics Workshop will be a half-day workshop on the morning of Tuesday, October 13 as part of IEEE VisWeek 2009. The Workshop will focus on tools for analyzing videos whose content ranges from persuasive videos (ads, propaganda, news) to YouTube videos. The purpose of video analysis is to gain insight into the contents of large collections of video and to focus detailed analysis on a smaller set of videos out of that collection. The capability to explore, categorize, and annotate videos is required by multiple types of analysts. User interfaces and techniques that support these activities including techniques in image processing are all central concerns of this workshop. However, the workshop goes beyond retrieval of images to interacting with a large video collection that one may have received from a query. The workshop will be focused around 2-3 presentations followed by an extensive discussion by participants of major issues in the field. The following issues will be open for discussion at the workshop: User interfaces for video analysis that optimize cognition Tools for exploring video collections Applications that categorize videos based on content Annotation schema for video analysis Automated and/or social methods of annotating videos for improved retrieval Image, speech, sound track, and text processing that supports analysis of large video collections Methodologies for determining originator, message, and audience impacts of video Applications that support reporting the results of the video analysis in a multimedia format The Program Committee is aware that there are no adequate solutions available for any of these topics, but that people have been putting effort towards these solutions. The discussions will be guided by the following questions: What are the most challenging scientific problems in video analytics? What breakthroughs have been made and what breakthroughs are needed to achieve adequate results? Are there disciplines that need to be brought to bear on these problems? Who is involved now and who is needed? Imagine a system that is adequate for the video analyst. What are its capabilities? To provide some focus for discussion, we will have 3 presentations of 20 minutes or so each that will address some of these questions and discuss current research.     “Exploratory Multimedia Analysis Applied to Video Analytics” Bill Ribarsky, UNCC     “Image and Video Retrieval and Visual Analytics - Opportunities for Collaboration” Mike      Christel, CMU     “The Needs of the Government Video Analyst” Nancy Chinchor, Open Source Center A special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications on Multimedia Analytics (September/October, 2010) will be devoted in significant part to the topic of this workshop. Plans for this issue will be discussed during the workshop. In addition, a workshop report will be written for publication that will document the contributions of everyone to the discussion. If you would like to attend the workshop, please send a note to one of the Program Committee members describing your interests and your work. Program Committee Nancy Chinchor, Chair DNI Open Source Center William Ribarsky University of North Carolina at Charlotte Michael Christel Carnegie Mellon University