Résumé
Data mining efforts are getting beyond the area of databases. They have been focusing on data collected in fields like art, design, hypermedia and digital media production, case-based reasoning and computational modeling of creativity, including evolutionary computation, and medical multimedia data. These exotic fields use variety of data sources and structures, interrelated by the nature of the phenomenon that these structures describe. As a result there is an increasing interest in new techniques and tools that can detect and discover patterns that can lead to a new knowledge in the problem domain where the data has been collected. There is also an increasing interest in the analysis of multimedia data generated by different distributed applications, like collaborative virtual environments, virtual communities, and multi-agent systems. These heterogeneous multimedia data records require sophisticated preprocessing, synchronization and other transformation procedures before even getting to the analysis stage.On the other hand, researchers in multimedia information systems, in the search for techniques for improving the indexing and retrieval of multimedia information are looking into new methods for discovering indexing information. Variety of techniques from machine learning, statistics, databases, knowledge acquisition, data visualization, image analysis, high performance computing, and knowledge-based systems, have been used mainly as a research handcraft activity. The development of multimedia databases and their query interfaces recall again the idea of incorporating multimedia data mining methods for dynamic indexing. The emerging international standard for multimedia content description (MPEG-7) promises to foster the collaboration in the field giving a uniform data representation.The 6th Workshop on Multimedia Data mining continues the series of successful workshops that have been held in conjunction with KDD Conferences in Boston (2000), San Francisco (2001), Edmonton (2002), Washington (2003) and Seattle (2004). These workshops brought together numerous experts in spatial data analysis, digital media, multimedia information retrieval, stateof- art data mining and knowledge discovery in multimedia database systems, and data analysis in collaborative virtual environments. For more information about the workshops see the reports in SIGKDD Exploration (2(2), 3 (2) and 4(2)).The topic of the 6th Workshop is Multimedia Mining. It means that the Workshop focuses on issues related to mining information from multi-modality, multisource, multi-format data in an integrated way. The selected papers represent a wide range of approaches, techniques, and tool that cover different aspects of image, audio and video indexing and annotation, and their integration into intelligent decision making systems. Furthermore, in order to encourage submissions of greenhouse work, which present early stages of cutting-edge research and development, this year a "short papers" session is added to the program of MDM 2005. This session will give to research teams the opportunity to present their research problems. In addition to the program of accepted papers, the workshop will enjoy an invited speaker: Professor Christos Faloutsos, Dept of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA.