Jana Machajdik of the Vienna University of Technology, in work supervised by Allan Hanbury of the IRF, has won the first prize in the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2010. Jana's work aims to estimate the emotion evoked by an image in the person viewing it, thereby allowing a user to search for images by their emotional effect. To do this, she encodes findings from art theory and psychology on the emotional effect of colour and texture, and uses machine learning to learn the link to emotion. This work was submitted to a challenge proposed by Yahoo! on Novel Image Understanding.

In the Grand Challenge session of the ACM Multimedia Conference, each participant had three minutes to do an "elevator pitch" of their solution to a proposed challenge. A committee of representatives from seven companies, including Yahoo!, Google and Nokia, chose the winning entry.

For more information, see:

• http://www.acmmm10.org/2010/10/multimedia-grand-challenge-2010-winners/
• http://www.imageemotion.org