This project proposes an environment to provide up-to-the-minute briefings on topics of interest, linking the user into an integrated collection of related multimedia documents. On the basis of a user profile or query, the proposed system filters multimedia information to match the user interests and automatically generates a summary of the set of matching documents to provide the user with an overview of the relevant information. The system also provides a representative set of images or video that match user interests as well as hypertext links into the documents themselves. The user can follow up with multimedia queries to refine the search for related images, video, or additional articles. The research has three main components: summarization, multimedia search and manipulation, and event tracking. Results will provide advances in summarization using language generation over information extracted from multiple live sources of news, in multimedia search and classification over compressed images using visual features, and in tracking of events by detecting surface differences between documents. Research will also result in technologies to aid a user in tracking multimedia information in specific news domains, reducing the number of documents end users such as journalists must access.
