Two year postdoc position at Aix-Marseille University (France) in
multimodal video recommendation

Application deadline: 01/31/2015
Starting: as soon as possible.

Description:
The ADNVIDEO project, funded in the framework of A*MIDEX
(http://amidex.univ-amu.fr/en/home), aims at extending multimodal
analysis models. It focuses on jointly processing audio, speech
transcripts, images, scenes, text overlays and user feedback. Using as
starting point the corpus, annotations and approaches developed during
the REPERE challenge (http://defi-repere.fr), this project aims at
going beyond indexing at single modalities by incorporating
information retrieval methods, not only from broadcast television
shows, but more generally on video documents requiring multimodal
scene analysis. The novelty here is to combine and correlate
information from different sources to enhance the description of the
content. The application for this project relates to the issue of
recommendation applied to videos: given a video, the system has to
find documents (text, image, and video) related to this video, either
on the surface level or the meaning level. In particular, the use case
considered may have, in terms of technology transfer, significant
economic benefits regarding automatic ad targeting: automatically find
the most relevant advertisement with respect to the content of a
video.

Objectives:
The candidate will participate in the development of a prototype for
video recommendation, leading to a technology transfer towards
business:

- Extraction of multimodal high-level descriptors (semantic-oriented
descriptors). These semantic-oriented descriptors are extracted from
low-level descriptors, especially from text transcripts.
    * Extract concepts (conceptualization) from the transcript of the audio.
    & Detection of semantic chapters by aggregation of concepts
extracted shot/scenewise
    * Detection and extraction of sentiments and emotions
- Aggregation of multimodal descriptors to form the multimodal
footprint of a video.
- Matching videos and promotional material using recommendation approaches
- Validation of the video recommendation prototype.
- Participation to the scientific life of the lab, including paper publication.

The allocation of the tasks can be adjusted depending on the wishes
and skills of the candidate.

Skills:
For this project, we are looking for one candidate with a PhD degree
in the areas of information retrieval, natural language processing,
machine learning:
- Strong programming skills (C++, Java, Python...).
- Desire to produce functioning end-to-end systems, life-scale live demos
- Scientific rigor
- Imagination
- Top notch publications
- Excellent communication skills
- Enjoy teamwork
Candidates must presently work outside of France.

Location:
The work will be conducted in the University of Aix-Marseille at the
Laboratoire des Science de l'information et des système (LSIS
http://www.lsis.org), within the ADNVidéo project, supported by
funding from a AMIDEX foundation in collaboration with Kalyzee
(http://www.kalyzee.com/). Both LSIS and Kalysee are located in the
historical and sunny city of Marseille, in south of France
(http://www.marseille.fr/sitevdm/versions-etrangeres/english--discover-marseille).

Contact: sebastien.fournier@lsis.org
Duration: 23 month

Candidates should email a letter of application, a detailed CV
including a complete list of publications, and source code showcasing
programming skills.