Paul Over

Also known as Paul D. Over

Paul Over is a former member of the Retrieval Group in NIST's Information Access Division who helped start TRECVID, the worldwide evaluation where researchers compare video retrieval systems on a shared test collection. He co-coordinated the TREC-9 Interactive Track in 2000, started TRECVID in 2001 with Alan Smeaton and Wessel Kraaij, and wrote about the first Document Understanding Conference summarization evaluation with Donna Harman in 2002. As first author, he reported on the TRECVid BBC rushes summarization evaluation in 2008 and on the TRECVID overviews for 2010 and 2014. In 2018, he shared the IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize with Smeaton, Kraaij and George Awad for the TRECVid datasets and workshops. By 2018, he had retired from NIST.

Now at: Hamburg University of Technology
Works: 84
Citations: 3,487
h-index: 25
Badges: Loyal

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

2000

TREC Interactive Track co-coordinator

In 2000, he co-coordinates the TREC-9 Interactive Track at NIST with W. Hersh of Oregon Health Sciences University. The track investigates interactive information retrieval by examining the process as well as the results.
2001

Starting TRECVID

In 2001, he starts TRECVID with Alan Smeaton and Wessel Kraaij. The worldwide evaluation gives researchers a large test collection, uniform scoring procedures, and a forum for comparing results in video information retrieval.
2002

Reporting the first DUC evaluation

With Donna K. Harman, he writes The DUC Summarization Evaluations in 2002, a report on the first formal evaluation of the Document Understanding Conference, the text summarization effort NIST launches in 2001.
2008

BBC rushes summarization evaluation

He, Alan Smeaton and George M. Awad describe the TRECVid 2008 BBC rushes summarization evaluation, in which 31 research teams submit video summaries of 40 rushes video files.
2010–2014

First author of TRECVID overviews

He is first author of the TRECVID 2010 overview, which reports 73 teams completing one or more of six tasks, among them content-based copy detection, instance search, and multimedia event detection. He is also first author of the TRECVID 2014 overview, in which forty teams complete one or more of five tasks, among them semantic indexing and multimedia event recounting.
2018

The Mark Everingham Prize

He shares the 2018 IEEE Computer Society PAMI Mark Everingham Prize with Alan Smeaton, Wessel Kraaij and George Awad for the TRECVid Video Retrieval Evaluation 2003-18 datasets and workshops. The prize recognizes datasets and workshops since 2003 that have driven progress in large scale video retrieval.
By 2018

Retired from NIST

By 2018, he has retired from NIST, where he was a member of the Retrieval Group in the Information Access Division.