Lyndon Kennedy
Yahoo! Research
4301 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054

Desk: 2GA-2218
Phone: 408-349-3229
Email: [email protected]

Lyndon Kennedy

Research Scientist, Yahoo!
Santa Clara, CA

Overview

I am a research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, CA, where I investigate techniques for automatically indexing, searching, and managing digital image and video collections with Malcolm Slaney. I received a Ph.D. degree in 2009 in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, where I conducted research in the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab under the direction of Prof. Shih-Fu Chang. I also hold B.S. (2003) and M.S. (2005) degrees, both in EE from Columbia University.

My research has received several awards and honors. I was co-author of a paper awarded the IBM Student Paper Award at ICIP in 2004. In 2006, I was co-author of a paper nominated for the Best Paper Award at ACM Multimedia. Most recently, in October 2007, I was invited as part of a group of 8 top senior Ph.D. students in the multimedia field to participate in the IBM Watson Emerging Leaders in Multimedia Workshop.

In the past, I have worked as an intern at Yahoo! Research Berkeley with Mor Naaman, contributed to the Mapping Meetings project under Prof. Dan Ellis, and developed a Robotic In-Vivo Imaging Device under Prof. Peter Allen.

Research Interests

I am interested in methods for enabling semantic search over multimedia collections. Many current solutions to this problem (particularly, web image search engines) rely primarily on textual metadata. The approaches that I am pursuing aim to improve upon these techniques by also leveraging the audio/visual content of the documents. Recently, I have been exploring the ways in which multimedia documents are re-used by many authors and how we can leverage the resulting emergent internal structures of multimedia collections to improve search, summarization, and exploration. In particular, content-based approaches, which can sometimes seem inadequate on their own, can be revisited and re-imagined in these new multiple-author environments (such as on the web or in social media sharing sites) and yield novel and robust applications.

In the past few years, I have been a frequent participant in the NIST TRECVID video retrieval benchmark and have designed a few high-performing video retrieval systems. I also had an active role in the development of the LSCOM Lexicon and Annotations, a first-of-its-kind collection of hundreds of visual concepts annotated over a large digital video collection, which has been downloaded by hundreds of researchers worldwide.

Publications

    Thesis

  1. L. Kennedy (2009). "Advanced Techniques for Multimedia Search: Leveraging Cues from Content and Structure." Ph.D. Thesis, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, 2009.

    2. Book Chapters

  2. L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2010). "Visual Ontology Construction and Concept Detection for Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval." in Semantic Computing, Phillip Sheu, Heather Yu, C. V. Ramamoorthy, Arvind K. Joshi, and Lotfi A. Zadeh (Eds.), IEEE Press/Wiley, 2010. (To appear).

    3. Journal Papers

  3. L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, A. Natsev (2008). "Query-adaptive Fusion for Multimodal Search." Proceedings of the IEEE, vol 96, no. 4, pp. 567-588, April 2008.
  4. W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2007). "Novel Reranking Methods for Visual Search." IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 14 no. 3, pp. 14-22. July-September, 2007.
  5. M. Naphade, J. Smith, J. Tesic, S.-F. Chang, W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, A. Hauptmann, J. Curtis (2006). "Large-Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia." IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 86-91, July-September, 2006.

    6. Conference Papers

  6. D. A. Shamma, L. Kennedy, E. Churchill (2010). "Tweetgeist: Can the Twitter Timeline Reveal the Structure of Broadcast Events?" ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Horizon (CSCW Horizon 2010), Savannah, February 2010. (To appear.)
  7. L. Kennedy, M. Slaney, K. Weinberger (2009). "Reliable Tags Using Image Similarity: Mining Specificity and Expertise from Large-Scale Multimedia Databases." ACM Workshop on Web-Scale Multimedia Corpus (WSMC 2009), Beijing, China, October 2009.
  8. D. A. Shamma, L. Kennedy, E. Churchill (2009). "Tweet the Debates: Understanding Community Annotation of Uncollected Sources." ACM Workshop on Social Media (WSM 2009), Beijing, China, October 2009. Nominated for Best Paper Award.
  9. L. Kennedy, M. Naaman (2009). "Less Talk, More Rock: Automated Organization of Community-Contributed Collections of Concert Videos." International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW 2009), Madrid, Spain, April 2009.
  10. L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2008). "Internet Image Archaeology: Automatically Tracing the Manipulation History of Photographs on the Web." ACM Multimedia 2008 (MM 2008), Vancouver, Canada, October 2008.
  11. L. Kennedy, M. Naaman (2008). "Generating Diverse and Representative Image Search Results for Landmark Queries." International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW 2008), Beijing, China, April 2008.
  12. L. Kennedy, M. Naaman, S. Ahern, R. Nair, T. Rattenbury (2007). "How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World: Context and Content in Community-Contributed Media Collections." ACM Multimedia 2007 (MM 2007). Augsburg, Germany, September 2007.
  13. W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2007). "Video Search Reranking Through Random Walk over Document-level Context Graph." ACM Multimedia 2007 (MM 2007). Augsburg, Germany, September 2007.
  14. A. Loui, J. Luo, S.-F. Chang, D. Ellis, W. Jiang, L. Kennedy, K. Lee, A. Yanagawa (2007). "Kodak Consumer Video Benchmark Data Set: Concept Definition and Annotation." ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval Workshop 2007 (MIR 2007). Augsburg, Germany, September 2007.
  15. L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2007). "A Reranking Approach for Context-based Concept Fusion in Video Indexing and Retrieval." ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR 2007), Amsterdam, 2007.
  16. W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang (2006), "Video Search Reranking via Information Bottleneck Principle." ACM Multimedia 2006 (MM 2006), Santa Barbara, 2006. Nominated for Best Paper Award.
  17. L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, I. Kozintsev (2006). "To Search or To Label?: Predicting the Performance of Search-based Automatic Image Classifiers." ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval Workshop (MIR 2006), Santa Barbara, 2006.
  18. L. Kennedy, A. Natsev, S.-F. Chang (2005). "Automatic Discovery of Query-Class-Dependent Models for Multimodal Search." ACM Multimedia (MM 2005), Singapore, November 2005.
  19. L. Xie, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, A. Divakaran, H. Sun, C.-Y. Lin (2005). "Layered Dynamic Mixture Model for Pattern Discovery in Asynchronous Multi-modal Streams." IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2005), Philadelphia, March 2005.
  20. L. Xie, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, A. Divakaran, H. Sun, C.-Y. Lin (2004). "Discovering meaningful multimedia patterns with audio-visual concepts and associated text." IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2004), Singapore, October 2004. Winner of IBM Student Paper Award.
  21. W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, C.-W. Huang, S.-F. Chang, C.-Y. Lin, G. Iyengar (2004). "News video story segmentation using fusion of multi-level multi-modal features in TRECVID 2003." IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2004), Montreal, May 2004.
  22. W. Hsu, S.-F. Chang, C.-W. Huang, L. Kennedy, C.-Y. Lin, G. Iyengar (2004). "Discovery and Fusion of Salient Multi-modal Features towards News Story Segmentation." SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference, San Jose, January 2004.
  23. L. Kennedy, D. Ellis (2003). "Pitch-based emphasis detection for the characterization of meeting recordings." IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2003), St. Thomas, December 2003.

    24. Notebook Papers

  24. S.-F. Chang, W. Hsu, W. Jiang, L. Kennedy, D. Xu, A. Yanagawa, E. Zavesky (2006). "Columbia University TRECVID-2006 Video Search and High-Level Feature Extraction." Notebook Paper. NIST TRECVID Workshop, Gaithersburg, November 2006.
  25. S.-F. Chang, W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, L. Xie, A. Yanagawa, E. Zavesky, D. Zhang (2005). "Columbia University TRECVID-2005 Video Search and High-Level Feature Extraction." Notebook Paper. NIST TRECVID Workshop, Gaithersburg, November 2005.
  26. A. Amir, J. Argillander, M. Berg, S.-F. Chang, M. Franz, W. Hsu, G. Iyengar, J. Kender, L. Kennedy, C.-Y. Lin, M. Naphade, A. Natsev, J. Smith, J. Tesic, G. Wu, R. Yan, D. Zhang (2004). "IBM Research TRECVID-2004 Video Retrieval System." Notebook Paper. NIST TRECVID Workshop, Gaithersburg, November 2004.
  27. L. Kennedy (2004). "Support Vector Machines for Discourse Segmentation in Meetings." JOINT AMI/PASCAL/IM2/M4 Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms (MLMI 2004). Martigny, 2004.
  28. L. Kennedy, D. Ellis (2004). "Laughter Detection in Meetings." Notebook Paper. NIST ICASSP 2004 Meeting Recognition Workshop, Montreal, May 2004.

    29. Technical Reports

  29. A. Yanagawa, A. Loui, J. Luo, S.-F. Chang, D. Ellis, W. Jiang, L. Kennedy, K. Lee (2008). "Kodak Consumer Video Benchmark Data Set: Concept Definition and Annotation." ADVENT Technical Report #222-2008-8, Columbia Unviersity, September, 2008.
  30. A. Yanagawa, S.-F. Chang, L. Kennedy, W. Hsu (2007). "Columbia University's Baseline Detectors for 374 LSCOM Semantic Visual Concepts." ADVENT Technical Report #222-2006-8, Columbia University, March, 2007.
  31. L. Kennedy. "Revision of LSCOM Event/Activity Annotations." ADVENT Technical Report #221-2006-7, Columbia University, December 2006.
  32. "LSCOM Lexicon Definitions and Annotations Version 1.0, DTO Challenge Workshop on Large Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia." ADVENT Technical Report #217-2006-3, Columbia University, March 2006.
  33. M. Naphade, L. Kennedy, J. Kender, S.-F. Chang, J. Smith, P. Over, A. Hauptmann (2005). "A Light Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia Understanding for TRECVID 2005." IBM Research Report RC23612 (W0505-104), May, 2005.
  34. W. Hsu, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, M. Franz, J. Smith (2005). "Columbia-IBM News Video Story Segmentation In TRECVID 2004." Columbia ADVENT Technical Report 209-2005-3, April, 2005.

    35. Technical Demonstrations

  35. D. A. Shamma, L. Kennedy, E. Churchill (2010). "Statler: Summarizing Media Through Short-Messaging Services." ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010), Savannah, February 2010. (To appear.)
  36. S.-F. Chang, L. Kennedy, E. Zavesky (2007). "Columbia University's Semantic Video Search Engine." ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR 2007), Amsterdam, July, 2007.