@INBOOK{1459Larson2014, AUTHOR = {Martha Larson and Pascal Kelm and Adam Rae and Claudia Hauff and Bart Thomee and Michele Trevisiol and Jaeyoung Choi and Olivier Van Laere and Steven Schockaert and Gareth J.F. Jones and Pavel Serdyukov and Vanessa Murdock and Gerald Friedland}, TITLE = {The Benchmark as a Research Catalyst: Charting the Progress of Geo-prediction for Social Multimedia}, YEAR = {2014}, BOOKTITLE = {Multimodal Location Estimation of Videos and Images}, EDITOR = {Jaeyoung Choi, Gerald Friedland}, PUBLISHER = {Springer International Publishing}, PAGES = {5--40}, CHAPTER = {2}, DOI = {10.1007/978-3-319-09861-6_2}, ABSTRACT = {Benchmarks have the power to bring research communities together to focus on specific research challenges. They drive research forward by making it easier to systematically compare and contrast new solutions, and evaluate their performance with respect to the existing state of the art. In this chapter, we present a retrospective on the Placing Task, a yearly challenge offered by the MediaEval Multimedia Benchmark. The Placing Task, launched in 2010, is a benchmarking task that requires participants to develop algorithms that automatically predict the geolocation of social multimedia (videos and images). This chapter covers the editions of the Placing Task offered in 2010–2013, and also presents an outlook onto 2014. We present the formulation of the task and the task dataset for each year, tracing the design decisions that were made by the organizers, and how each year built on the previous year. Finally, we provide a summary of future directions and challenges for multimodal geolocation, and concluding remarks on how benchmarking has catalyzed research progress in the research area of geolocation prediction for social multimedia.} }