| Multimedia information access provides the key technology for the creation of artifacts that assist us smoothly in our daily lives, improving our experiences at work and pleasure. Yet, creating such artifacts proves to be a challenging engineering process: the complexity of state of the art technology is ever increasing, due to the required integration of various, (independently imperfect) content-based analysis techniques (domain-specific as well as generic), while, simultaneously, the size of multimedia collections to be handled grows significantly, because more data become available in digital form. The work carried out is focused on bridging the gap between (autonomous) distributed database architectures and the need to scale algorithms for multimedia information retrieval beyond a few thousand elements. Such a multidisciplinary approach is considered pivotal for making progress. Both research lines are supported by activities geared at bridging the technology gap itself using our MonetDB product family, a collection of tools to build information systems, using our innovative technology. |
