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In this paper we present an approach for supporting users in the difficult task of searching for video. We use collaborative feedback mined from the interactions of earlier users of a video search system to help users in their current search tasks. Our objective is to improve the quality of the results that users find, and in doing so also assist users to explore a large and complex information space. It is hoped that this will lead to them considering search options that they may not have considered otherwise. We performed a user centred evaluation. The results of our evaluation indicate that we achieved our goals, the performance of the users in finding relevant video clips was enhanced with our system; users were able to explore the collection of video clips more and users demonstrated a preference for our system that provided recommendations., Presented at 1st Intl Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking, 2008 (arXiv:0908.0583)

In this demo paper we demonstrate our approach and system for using implicit actions involved in video search to provide recommendations to users. The goal of this system is to improve the quality of the results that users find, and in doing so, help users to explore a large and difficult information space and help them consider search options that they may not have considered otherwise. Results of a user evaluation show that this approach achieves all of these goals.

In this paper, we propose a model for exploiting community based usage information for video retrieval. Implicit usage information from a pool of past users could be a valuable source to address the difficulties caused due to the semantic gap problem. We propose a graph-based implicit feedback model in which all the usage information can be represented. A number of recommendation algorithms were suggested and experimented. A simulated user evaluation is conducted on the TREC VID collection and the results are presented. Analyzing the results we found some common characteristics on the best performing algorithms, which could indicate the best way of exploiting this type of usage information.

Little data exists concerning suicides and attempted suicides on professional duty. Now that the French Army is becoming professional, it is necessary to describe methods of self-destruction, in order to facilitate preventive measures.The French Army operated a surveillance system to record all instances of suicide and attempted suicide. Under this surveillance system, all suicidal acts and attempts must be reported through an anonymous standard form completed by a military physician. This form records demographic data, the circumstances and known motives. For the epidemiological analysis, we used the chi square test and the Student test. A method of indirect standardization was employed to enable comparisons between military suicides and those within the general French population in 1996. We chose a risk of error of 5%.During the course of 1998, 145 forms were gathered for professional armed forces. Of these, 40 were recorded as actual suicides and 105 as attempted suicides. The suicide rate corresponded to 14p 100,000. Suicides were limited exclusively to males, the average age at death was 36. Comparisons with the French male population at large (using the indirect method of standardization) showed a standardized mortality rate of 0.43 (p0.05). Methods of self-destruction employed were mostly hanging and using firearms. Attempted suicide rate was 31.5 p 100,000, with a relatively even balance between males and females. The average age was 30. Methods of self-destruction employed were mostly drug ingestion and laceration. Difficulties with personal relationships were the principal motive recorded, whilst instances of psychiatric diseases were rare. Previous suicide attempts were known in 21% of recorded suicide attempts in 1998 and in 10% of actual suicide. There was no suicidal act during or linked to an outside army operation. The ratio suicide-attempted suicide was 0.38.The fact that the rate of suicide in the French Army is lower than the national average could be explained by the medical criteria used to select army personnel on active duty. These results should be interpreted with caution: our data only covers a single year. Moreover, there is a certain bias in the surveillance system used. Measures in the French Army to prevent suicide are based on a significant medical component within units, particularly during operational tours where there is sometimes a psychiatrist. Although the military physician is constrained by professional secrecy, he must execute his duty as an advisor to the commanding officer to signal human factors that need to be taken into account. Responsibility for knowing men and living conditions lies with the commanding officer. Epidemiological surveillance is a key element of analyzing the risks of suicidal. Its contributing role should be regularly reevaluated.

Recently we reported the characterization of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIVlhoest) from a central African l'hoest monkey (Cercopithecus lhoesti lhoesti) that revealed a distant relationship to SIV isolated from a mandrill (SIVmnd). The present report describes a novel SIV (SIVsun) isolated from a healthy, wild-caught sun-tailed monkey (Cercopithecus lhoesti solatus), another member of the l'hoest superspecies. SNsun replicated in a variety of human T-cell lines and in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of macaques (Macaca spp.) and patas monkeys (Erythrocebus patas). A full-length infectious clone of SIVsun was derived, and genetic analysis revealed that SIVsun was most closely related to SIVlhoest, with an amino acid identity of 71% in Gag, 73% in Pol, and 67% in Env. This degree of similarity is reminiscent of that observed between SIVagm isolates from vervet, grivet, and tantalus species of African green monkeys. The close relationship between SNsun and SIVlhoest, despite their geographically distinct habitats, is consistent with evolution from a common ancestor, providing further evidence for the ancient nature of the primate lentivirus family. In addition, this observation leads us to suggest that the SIVmnd lineage should be designated the SIVlhoest lineage.

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Proceedings of ECML PKDD (The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases) Discovery Challenge 2009, Bled, Slovenia, September 7, 2009., We present a social tag recommendation model for collaborative bookmarking systems. This model receives as input a bookmark of a web page or scientific publication, and automatically suggests a set of social tags useful for annotating the bookmarked document. Analysing and processing the bookmark textual contents - document title, URL, abstract and descriptions - we extract a set of keywords, forming a query that is launched against an index, and retrieves a number of similar tagged bookmarks. Afterwards, we take the social tags of these bookmarks, and build their global co-occurrence sub-graph. The tags (vertices) of this reduced graph that have the highest vertex centrality constitute our recommendations, wh, This research was supported by the European Commission under contracts FP6-027122-SALERO, FP6-033715-MIAUCE and FP6-045032 SEMEDIA. The expressed content is the view of the authors but not necessarily the view of SALERO, MIAUCE and SEMEDIA projects as a whole

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073), Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Contexts and Ontologies: Theory, Practice and Applications (C&O-2006), Combining traditional personalization techniques with novel knowledge representation paradigms, such as the ontologybased approach proposed in the Semantic Web field, is a challenging task. Personalization is a difficult problem when dealing with multimedia content and information retrieval, where context is increasingly acknowledged to be a key notion in order to make proper sense of user needs. This work focuses on contextualization within personalization in a multimedia environment. Towards that scope, we propose a novel contextual knowledge modeling scheme, and an approach for the dynamic, contextual activation of semantic user preferences to better represent user interests in coherence with ongoing user activities, e.g. in an interactive retrieval process. The application of this methodology is demonstrated using two user scenarios, and the performance results of a preliminary experiment are shown