Social Multimedia and Storytelling [Guest editors' introduction]

T he pervasive use of media-capturing devices and the increasing adoption of online social networking platforms have led to the proliferation of digital content that documents the real world—everything from landmarks and points of interest to live concerts and demonstrations. Such content holds great potential for creating richer representations of real-world entities and helping tell engaging stories about them. This is due to not only the abundance of diverse media sources but also the availability of a large variety of contextual information, ranging from location metadata and textual descriptions to online interactions and user feedback (in the form of ratings and comments, for example). Leveraging social multimedia content and its surrounding context thus presents new opportunities for better capturing and describing the stories that unfold in the real world, and for telling them in innovative ways to large and remote audiences. However, the uncontrolled nature of usercontributed content and the complexity of the social media life cycle raise significant research challenges related to both the effective collection, mining, and indexing of social multimedia and the combination, creative reuse, and presentation of such content. To this end, this special issue on social multimedia and storytelling presents recent advances in this exciting new area, building on research results presented at the First International Workshop on Social Multimedia and Storytelling (SoMuS; https:// sites.google.com/site/socialmultimediastorytelling), held during the International Conference on Information Retrieval (ICMR). In particular, the workshop included several presentations and two keynote speeches on pertinent research problems, ranging from multimedia sharing and ranking to event-based multimedia indexing, hyperlinking and summarization, and storytelling.