  The widespread integration of cameras in hand-held and head-worn devices as
well as the ability to share content online enables a large and diverse visual
capture of the world that millions of users build up collectively every day. We
envision these images as well as associated meta information, such as GPS
coordinates and timestamps, to form a collective visual memory that can be
queried while automatically taking the ever-changing context of mobile users
into account. As a first step towards this vision, in this work we present
Xplore-M-Ego: a novel media retrieval system that allows users to query a
dynamic database of images and videos using spatio-temporal natural language
queries. We evaluate our system using a new dataset of real user queries as
well as through a usability study. One key finding is that there is a
considerable amount of inter-user variability, for example in the resolution of
spatial relations in natural language utterances. We show that our retrieval
system can cope with this variability using personalisation through an online
learning-based retrieval formulation.
