Systems for searching and organizing multimedia information have matured during the last few years. However, retrieving specific media objects is still a challenging task, especially if the query can only be vaguely defined or a similar object, e.g. a piece of music, should be retrieved. The main reasons for the problems in multimedia search are still on the one hand, the users' difficulty in specifying their interests in the form of a well-defined query due to insufficient support from the interface, and on the other hand, the problem of extracting relevant (semantic) features from the multimedia objects itself. Besides, ideally user specific interests should be considered when ranking or automatically organizing result sets. To improve today's retrieval tools and thus the overall satisfaction of a user, it is necessary to develop advanced techniques able to support the user in the interactive retrieval process.

Since we believe that for the above mentioned challenges artificial intelligence plays a key role, we organize AMR this year co-located with the Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011). In fact, techniques going from supervised learning to automatic clustering, from human-machine interfaces to artificial emotion synthesis, from knowledge representation management to visualization can all contribute to the Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval Challenge. In particular, but not limited to, we believe that AI can induce a technological jump, not only in meta-tags labeling, but in areas such as user analysis, data organization, adaptive structuring and ranking.

The Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval workshop aims to bring researchers, practitioners and companies with specific focus on existing and novel techniques into the field of multimedia retrieval. We promote the idea of having a separate event for focusing to the specificities of our challenge. The final goal of this workshop is, thus, to intensify the exchange of ideas, to provide an overview of current activities in this area and to point out connections between multimedia, retrieval and artificial intelligence research

 The 9^th International Workshop on Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval, AMR'2011, will be held on 18-19 July at the Universidad de Barcelona, Spain.