Research Interests
My research interests are in the area of vision and language information analysis and search. In particular:
- Multimodal search and summarization (read this post about our work
with the BBC R&D).
- Learning multimodal semantic embeddings.
- Temporal and memory models.
- Social media information quality.
- Multimodal conversational AI (Workshop
@ ACM Multimedia)
Projects@NOVASearch group
I am coordinating the NOVASearch group at FCT/UNL. Our group's applied research targets the Web, social media and clinical domains, and a number of research and industry projects have funded the team's work:
- iFetch (Local-PI, 2020-2024, CMU|Portugal) - Multimodal conversational agents for online marketplaces.
- SmartyFlow (Local-PI, 2017-2020, ANI PT2020) - Face anti-spoofing biometrics for airport border control.
- COGNITUS (Local-PI, 2016-2019, H2020 ICT) - Convergence of UGC and professional media.
- GoLocal (PI, 2016-2020, CMU|Portugal) - Social media monitoring for context aware recommendations.
- QSearch (Local-PI, 2012-2015, ANI QREN) - Enterprise domain search.
- ImTV (PI, 2010-2013, UTAustin|Portugal) - On-Demand Immersive TV.
- CS4SE (PI, 2010-2013, FCT/MCTES) - Compressive sensing for multimedia search engines.
Selected Publications
- D. Semedo, J. Magalhaes, Diachronic cross-modal embeddings , ACM Multimedia 2019.
- F. Martins, J. Magalhaes, J. Callan, Modeling temporal evidence from external collections . ACM Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2019.
- D. Semedo, J. Magalhaes, Temporal cross-media retrieval with soft constraints , ACM Multimedia 2018.
- G. Marcelino, R. Pinto, J. Magalhaes, Ranking news-quality multimedia , ACM International Conference in Multimedia Retrieval 2018. (Best paper nomination).
- I. Arapakis, F. Peleja, B. B. Cambazoglu, J. Magalhaes, Linguistic benchmarks of online news article quality . Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2016.
- F. Martins, J. Magalhaes, J. Callan, Barbara Made the News: Mining the behavior of crowds for time-aware learning to rank . ACM Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2016.
- A. Mourao, F. Martins, J. Magalhaes, "Multimodal medical information retrieval with unsupervised rank fusion". Comp. Med. Imag. and Graph. 2015.
- A. Mourao, J. Magalhaes, Competitive affective gaming: winning with a smile . ACM Multimedia 2013.
- J. Magalhaes, F. Ciravegna, S. M. Rueger: Exploring multimedia in a keyword space. ACM Multimedia 2008.
- J. Magalhaes, S. M. Rueger: Information-theoretic semantic-multimedia retrieval . ACM Int'l Conference on Image and Video Retrieval 2007. (Best paper award).
My full list of publications is available on DBLP.
Graduate Students Advising
- Paula Figueiredo (2020-...)
- Gustavo Goncalves (2019-...)
- Carla Viegas (2016-...)
- David Semedo (2016-2020)
- Flavio Martins (2013-2018)
- Andre Mourao (2012-2017)
- Filipa Peleja (2010-2015)
If you are motivated and willing to work-hard + play-hard in researching vision and language understanding:
- We have several ongoing Data Science projects. I'm happy to discuss ideas and opportunities that fit the scope of ongoing projects.
- Please, read this first: Richard Hamming, "You and your research" (Jamie Callan says this is for senior researchers, but I still recommend this for young minds, like mine was at the time I read it :) ).
Teaching
Office hours: Thursdays 17h00 - 19h00
Courses:
- Information Retrieval (Computer Science BSc/MSc and Big Data Analysis and Engineering MSc)
- Web Data Mining and Search (Computer Science MSc)
- Towards Evolving Vision and Language Understanding (Computer Science PhD Seminar)
Chairing and Service
- ACM Multimedia 2022 General Chair ( Hurray!!! it will be in Lisbon!!!! :)) )
- ACM Multimedia 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Conversational AI, organizer
- ECIR2020 General Chair ( After the COVID lockdown, it became the first ever 100% online conference in Retrieval !! :) )
- ACM Multimedia PC Area Chair 2019, 2020
- ECIR2015 Demo Chair
- ACM ICMR 2014 Publicity Chair
- OAIR 2013 General Chair
- PC member: ACM Multimedia, ACM SIGIR, ACM CIKM, ACM ICMR, ECIR.
Biography
Joao Magalhaes is an Associate Professor at the Department of
Computer Science of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (FCT NOVA). He
holds a Ph.D. degree (2008) in Computer Science from Imperial College
London, UK. His research interests cover the different problems of
vision and language understanding, in particular: multimedia search
and summarization, Web and social media mining and multimodal
information embeddings. He was the General Chair of the 42nd European
Conference on Information Retrieval. Currently, he is the Honorary
Chair for ACM Multimedia Asia 2021 and the General chair of ACM
Multimedia 2022 - Lisbon.
He is regularly involved in international program committees and EU
project review panels. He has participated in several research
projects (national, EU-FP7 and H2020), and was the Coordinator of
several research projects including international projects with the
University of Texas at Austin, USA and with the Carnegie Mellon
University, USA. Recent projects include COGNITUS, a H2020 project led
by the BBC, and iFetch, led by Farfetch.
His team's work is published at top-tier venues, including ACM
Multimedia, ACM WSDM, ACL, ECIR, and ACM ICMR. The work of his group
has been awarded, or nominated for, several best paper awards:
Intl Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese
2020 best paper award, ACM Intl Conference in Multimedia Retrieval
2018 nomination for best paper, ACM Intl Conference on the Theory of
Information Retrieval 2018 nomination for best paper, Advances in
Computer Entertainment 2016, best poster paper. His PhD and MSc
received the ACM Int l Conference in Image and Video Retrieval 2007
Best Paper Award, and the Portuguese national engineering association
Young Engineer Award in 2002 respectively.