Book excerpt: This volume introduces machine learning techniques that are particularly powerful and effective for modeling multimedia data and common tasks of multimedia content analysis. It systematically covers key machine learning techniques in an intuitive fashion and demonstrates their applications through case studies. Coverage includes examples of unsupervised learning, generative models and discriminative models. In addition, the book examines Maximum Margin Markov (M3) networks, which strive to combine the advantages of both the graphical models and Support Vector Machines (SVM).