1. A computer-implemented method for information seeking in a multimedia collection of objects comprising: through a graphical user interface, receiving at least one of an input text query and an input image query; providing for a user to select a subset of objects from a multimedia collection, at least some of the objects in the collection comprising first and second modalities, wherein the first and second modalities comprise a text modality and an image modality; displaying representations of objects in the subset on a local map; at each of a plurality of iterations: providing for the user to annotate the text and image modalities of an object represented in the local map with a relevance label, wherein an object's text modality and image modality are labeled independently; automatically assigning a default forgetting factor for at least one of the first and second modalities, or providing for the user to select the forgetting factor for the at least one of the first and second modalities; automatically assigning a default locality factor for at least one annotated object, or providing for the user to select a locality factor for the at least one annotated object; with a computer processor, computing relevance scores for unlabeled objects in the collection, each relevance score taking into account labels applied to other objects, computed similarity measures between one of the unlabeled objects and the other objects in the collection, the locality factor selected by the user or the default locality factor, and the forgetting factor selected by the user or the default forgetting factor, the forgetting factor placing a greater weight on objects labeled in a more recent iteration; modifying the local map based on the computed relevance scores; and displaying the modified local map on a visual display.
1. A computer-implemented method for information seeking in a multimedia collection of objects comprising: through a graphical user interface, receiving at least one of an input text query and an input image query; providing for a user to select a subset of objects from a multimedia collection, at least some of the objects in the collection comprising first and second modalities, wherein the first and second modalities comprise a text modality and an image modality; displaying representations of objects in the subset on a local map; at each of a plurality of iterations: providing for the user to annotate the text and image modalities of an object represented in the local map with a relevance label, wherein an object's text modality and image modality are labeled independently; automatically assigning a default forgetting factor for at least one of the first and second modalities, or providing for the user to select the forgetting factor for the at least one of the first and second modalities; automatically assigning a default locality factor for at least one annotated object, or providing for the user to select a locality factor for the at least one annotated object; with a computer processor, computing relevance scores for unlabeled objects in the collection, each relevance score taking into account labels applied to other objects, computed similarity measures between one of the unlabeled objects and the other objects in the collection, the locality factor selected by the user or the default locality factor, and the forgetting factor selected by the user or the default forgetting factor, the forgetting factor placing a greater weight on objects labeled in a more recent iteration; modifying the local map based on the computed relevance scores; and displaying the modified local map on a visual display. 2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the providing for the user to select a subset of objects from a multimedia collection includes providing for the user to drag one or more objects from a global map into the local map on the graphical user interface, the global map displaying all the objects in the multimedia collection.