SoMuS: Social Multimedia and Storytelling

The pervasive use of media capturing devices and the wide adoption of online social networking platforms have led to the proliferation of online content capturing places and events. Such content holds great potential for forming richer representations of real-world places and events, and creating engaging stories around them. This is not only due to the abundance of diverse multimedia content, but also due to the availability of rich contextual information, ranging from location metadata and textual descriptions to online interactions and user feedback (e.g., in the form of ratings). Therefore, leveraging social multimedia content and its surrounding context offers ample opportunities for better understanding and capturing the real world and for building innovative and engaging applications. However, the uncontrolled nature of user-contributed content and the complexity of the social media lifecycle raise significant research challenges related both to the effective collection, mining, and indexing of social multimedia and to their combination, creative reuse, and presentation. To this end, the first edition of the Social Multimedia and Storytelling (SoMuS) workshop attempts to explore this exciting new area and highlight the key research challenges and opportunities.