Video Analysis Researcher

1. Welcome
2. 1. Preface
3. 2. Birth and Infancy
4. 3. Video Analysis Researcher
5. 4. MediaTeam and Convergence
6. 5. Ubiquitous History
7. 6. Waterfall Model of Innovation
8. 7. Living Lab and Societal Impact
9. 8. Humanism and Technology
10. Credits

Dr. Mika Rautiainen has worked in MediaTeam throughout its existence. During these ten years his career path has progressed quite traditionally from a part-time trainee to a post-doctoral researcher.

Rautiainen started in MediaTeam in the autumn of 1997 as a part-time trainee. In 1998, he visited the NEC Central Research Labs in Tokyo, where he worked on camera-based document analysis systems for six months. After this trip, he continued at MediaTeam as a research trainee, and, in 2000, became a Master’s Thesis researcher. By this time, he had already participated in two projects: Countess, funded by the National Technology Agency, and IDIR. Both projects focused on the research of image retrieval, albeit from a slightly different angle, so it is no wonder that his thesis, titled "Finding semantic knowledge from images in visual information retrieval and surveillance applications", concerned information retrieval.

In 2001, after receiving his M.Sc. diploma, Rautiainen left for a six month research exchange in the Laboratory for Language and Media Processing in the University of Maryland, located in the USA, near Washington D.C. He worked under the guidance of Dr. David Doermann, the co-director of the laboratory. During his stay there, the topic for his doctoral thesis began to focus on semantic video retrieval, as he was introduced to the TREC video retrieval evaluation at NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology). His trip to Maryland was a part of the long-running cooperation between MediaTeam and the University of Maryland. The research exchange has resulted in numerous collaborative scientific publications and influenced several doctoral theses.

After returning to Oulu, Rautiainen continued his post-graduate studies and worked as a researcher in MediaTeam. He continued working towards his thesis, especially in projects funded by the Academy of Finland, namely Semantic Gap and CBIR (Content-based Information Retrieval). He also managed MediaTeam’s participation in the worldwide TREC video retrieval evaluation.

During his post-graduate time, Rautiainen also participated in other development projects, such as Mobile Kärpät, Oulu Expo, Digital Oulu Cultural Database, Vikings and several subcontracted projects related to mobile devices. In December 2006, Rautiainen defended his doctoral thesis, which focused on content-based methods that assist users in locating relevant information from heterogeneous video databases. It introduced computational methods for estimating visual and conceptual similarities between video shots and a model for the content-based browsing of video databases.

Currently, Rautiainen is working at MediaTeam as a post-doctoral researcher, and his plan is to continue that for the next three years and focus on video analysis and its usage in a multimedia information system from the point of view of storage and retrieval. He points out that video analysis can also be utilised in several other application domains, making it a broad and interesting field of research.

The thing that attracted Rautiainen to an academic career was the opportunity to innovate and work with topics that are novel and uncharted. Concretely, research work has meant plenty of reading and investigating various phenomena, as well as writing scientific articles about the findings. In industry-related projects, it has meant tighter control on what should be investigated and how deep a given subject can be delved into. MediaTeam has also given him the opportunity to conduct international research, participate in international conferences and visit foreign research institutions.

When asked about MediaTeam’s future, Rautiainen says that he believes that MediaTeam’s focus on creating scientific information will probably produce innovations and information that can be perceived and adopted as new and relevant technological knowledge. He thinks it is quite possible that MediaTeam’s future will bring technological innovations that interest the scientific and international media. The successful establishment of an internationally renowned research brand is not easy, however, and requires decades of research on potentially disruptive technological phenomena. But once established, such reputation presents an opportunity to collaborate with researchers from different cultures while, at the same time, becoming a front-liner in global technological progress. Lastly, Rautiainen encourages beginner researchers to have open-minded dialogue with colleagues, anticipate upcoming tech trends, pursue ideas to their completion and strive towards higher knowledge in their research – that is, to “ask a lot of what’s and why’s.”

Mika Rautiainen wishes the 10-year-old MediaTeam a happy birthday!

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