Most multimedia objects are spatio-temporal simulacrums of the real world. This supports our view that the next 
grand challenge for our community will be understanding and formally modeling the flow of life around us, over  
many modalities and scales. As technology advances, the nature of these simulacrums will evolve as well,  
becoming more detailed and revealing more information to us concerning the nature of reality.

Currently, IoT is the state-of-the-art organizational approach to construct complex representations of the flow  
of life around us. Various, perhaps pervasive, sensors, working collectively, will broadcast to us representations  
of real events in real-time. It will be our task to continuously extract the semantics of these representations  
and possibly react to them by injecting some response actions into the mix to ensure some desired outcome.

In linguistics, pragmatics studies context and how it affects semantics. Context is usually culturally, socially, and  
historically based. For example, pragmatics would encompass a speaker’s intent, body language, and penchant for  
sarcasm, as well as other signs, often culturally based, such as the speaker’s type of clothing, which could
influence a statement’s meaning. Generic signal/sensor-based retrieval should also use syntactical, semantic,  
and pragmatics-based approaches. If we are to understand and model the flow of life around us, this will be a necessity. 

Our community has successfully developed various approaches to decode the syntax and semantics of these  
artifacts. The development of techniques that use contextual information is in its infancy, however. With the  
expansion of the data horizon, through the ever-increasing use of metadata, we can certainly put all media on a more equal footing.

The NLP community has its own set of approaches in semantics and pragmatics. Natural language is certainly  
an excellent exemplar of multimedia, and the use of audio and text features has played a part in the development of our field.

After a successful first workshop in Miami, we intend to continue this tradition with the second workshop.  

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. To be included in the IEEE Xplore Library, accepted papers must be registered and presented. The Call for Papers can be found at https://easychair.org/cfp/MMPrag19. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Regular papers (6 pages max)
• Short papers (4 pages max)
• Demo papers (4 pages max)
• Extended abstracts (1 page max for a 5 minutes presentation)

Important Dates

Here are some important dates:

• January 25, 2019 -- Submissions due
• February 1, 2019 -- Acceptance notification
• February 8, 2019 -- Camera-ready papers and author registrations due
• March 30, 2019   -- Workshop date

List of Topics

Cross-cultural contributions are encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Affective computing
• Annotation techniques for natural language/images/videos/other sensor-based modalities
• Applications to ecology, environmental science, health sciences, social sciences
• Computational semiotics
• Deception detection
• Digital humanities
• Distributional semantics
• Education and tutoring systems
• Event modeling, recognition, and understanding
• Gesture modeling, recognition, and understanding
• Human-machine interaction
• Integration of multimodal features
• Machine learning for multimodal interaction
• Multimodal analysis of human behavior
• Multimodal data modeling, dataset development, sensor fusion
• Ontologies
• Semantic-based modeling and retrieval
• Storytelling
• Structured semantic embeddings
• Word, sentence, and feature embeddings - generation, semantic property discovery, corpus dependices, sensitivity analysis, retrieval aids

Committees

Program Committee

• Wael Abd-Almageed, ISI, USA
• Mohamed Abouelenien, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
• Rajeev Agrawal, ITL, ERDC, USA
• Akiko Aizawa, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• Yiannis Aloimonos, University of Maryland, USA
• Anya Belz, University of Brighton, United Kingdom
• Renaldo Bonacin, CTI, Brazil
• Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Federal University of ABC, Brazil
• Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, USA
• David Hogg, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
• Ashutosh Jadhav, IBM, USA
• Clement Leung, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
• Debanjan Mahata, Bloomberg, USA
• David Martins, Federal University of ABC, Brazil
• Adam Pease, Articulate Software, USA
• James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
• Terry Ruas, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
• Victoria Rubin, University of Western Ontario, Canada
• Shin'ichi Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• Amit Sheth, Wright State University, USA
• Peter Stanchev, Kettering University, USA
• Joe Tekli, American University of Lebanon, Lebanon

Organizing committee

• Richard Chbeir, University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour, Pau, France
• William Grosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

Invited Speakers

• To be announced

Venue

The workshop will be co-located with the IEEE Second International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR'19), the latter to be held from March 28-30 in San Jose, California, USA. The workshop will be held on March 30, 2019. The venue is the Crowne Plaza San Jose-Silicon Valley Hotel at 777 Bellew Drive, Milpitas, California 95053. The hotel's telephone number is +1 (408) 321-9500 and its website is http://www.cpsanjosesiliconvalley.com/

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Richard Chbeir (richard.chbeir@univ-pau.fr) or William Grosky (wgrosky@umich.edu).