Alan Smeaton jointly wins the IEEE Computer Society Mark Everingham prize

The 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize has been awarded jointly to Prof Alan Smeaton, Wessel Kraaij (Professor of Applied Data Analytics at Leiden University), Paul Over (Member of the Retrieval Group, Information Access Division at NIST(now retired)) and George Awad (also NIST) for “the TRECVid Video Retrieval Evaluation 2003-2018 (datasets and workshops).”

The Prize was presented at the biennial European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in Munich, Germany, on September 12th 2018.

DCU Academic Prof Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University and is a Founding Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at DCU. He is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy, the highest academic distinction that can be awarded in Ireland and in 2017 was honoured as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) for his "outstanding contributions to multimedia indexing and retrieval".

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVid) is a worldwide benchmarking activity to encourage research in video information retrieval by providing a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for organizations interested in comparing their results.

TRECVid completed its fifteenth annual cycle at the end of 2017 and in 2018 TRECVid will involve almost 63 research organizations, universities and other consortia. Throughout its existence, TRECVid has benchmarked both interactive and automatic/manual searching for video shots, automatic detection of a variety of semantic features, shot boundary detection and the detection of events and instances. Its impact on computer vision research has been significant, involving from about 200 to 400 researchers annually and producing more than 2,700 research papers derived from TRECVid’s data.

In addition, other economic benefits as published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, have been documented. Alan Smeaton and Wessel Kraaij have been TRECVid’s scientific coordinators since 2003, and Paul Over and George Awad have managed the project from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US.

This Prize is to commemorate the late Mark Everingham and to encourage others to follow in his footsteps by acting to further progress the computer vision community as a whole. The prize is given to a researcher, or a team of researchers, who have made a selfless contribution of significant benefit to other members of the computer vision community.

The award is given out by the IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Technical Committee.

Previous Mark Everingham Prize recipients include the teams behind OpenCV, Imagenet, Caffe and ICVSS.