This talk presents MediaEval (http://www.multimediaeval.org), an international multimedia benchmark initiative that offers innovative new tasks to the multimedia community. It is open to any research group who signs up to participate. MediaEval sets its focus on social and human aspects of multimedia and also strives to emphasize the ‘multi’ in multimedia, including the use of speech, audio, tags, users, context as well as visual content.

After an introduction to MediaEval, the talk summarizes the 2011 season, which culminated with the MediaEval 2011 workshop that was held 1-2 September in Pisa, Italy. The workshop was an official satellite event of Interspeech 2011. The following tasks were offered in the 2011 season:

Placing task
Spoken Web Search task
Affect task
Genre tagging task
Rich Speech Retrieval task
Social event detection task

The talk also includes an explanation of how task proposals are collected and how a survey is used to select next year's task. Task proposal from the community are welcome.