Secure Embedded Data Schemes for User Adaptive Multimedia Presentation

In this Digital/Internet Age, digital multimedia holds an unlimited potential, and virtually all forms of media content, including books, video games, music and software are now available for digital distribution. Digital multimedia libraries, comprising a large amount of such digital media (the so-called Digital Intellectual Property), in the form of images, video, audio and graphics are rapidly growing. Also, due to the unprecedented growth of the World Wide Web, vast amounts of multimedia data is readily available leading to an explosion of multimedia and hypermedia database creation and sharing. Digital information embedding techniques for various types of media, for a variety of applications including digital libraries, museum cataloging, medical and healthcare industries, digital preservation systems, educational systems and personalization systems, are of significant interest in two areas. Firstly, these are useful for the realization of efficient database indexing schemes and customization, which in turn lead to efficient tools for the organization, retrieval, adaptive presentation, and distribution of digital media content. Secondly, these are useful in developing tools to protect, detect and verify ownership and/or usage rights for the Digital Intellectual Property and also the tracking of these in the distribution medium. In either of these applications, information embedding schemes which allow for a detailed level of source description, and which are robust to some of the distortions encountered in the distribution medium (e.g., JPEG compression for images), are particularly attractive. This paper presents an overview of multimedia presentation adaptation through the use of robust information descriptors and a novel information embedding technique for digital images that allows for significantly higher information throughput and increased robustness compared to many of the existing techniques

ICT and the Deregulation of the Electric Power Industry: A Story of an Architect\u27s New Tool

Deregulation of electric power industry in the USA is an effort by the Federal and State governments to exercise power through the control of mission-critical infrastructure. This research asserts that information and communication technology (ICT) was necessary for this deregulatory effort, but ICT by itself is not sufficient to assure the success of deregulation. Using metaphors adopted from Kling and Scacchi\u27s "web of computing", the paper shows how regulators attempted to change the social fabric in the electric power industry by using ICT to alter a complicated set of interdependencies and complementarities. Given the social and infrastructural nature of the research, web models are an effective mechanism to understand these complex relationships. In the paper, the basic web model is extended with architectural aspects to draw out the original connections with "urban infrastructure" and architecture. Ethnographic methods were used to gain a deep understanding of the ecology of the electric power industry. Data were collected over a nine-month period at a large utility\u27s grid dispatch control center because these centers were the primary focal point of deregulatory efforts. Essentially, the paper is another data point indicating rational models are of little value outside tightly controlled circumstances. The paper\u27s primary contribution, however, is intended for policy-makers changing ICT designs at an architectural level using regulatory mechanisms, and for ICT analysts who must map the resulting complex of ecological interrelationships into an integrated design. The resulting integrated ICT infrastructure is used to run the electric power infrastructure that information societies depend on in the most intimate way on a daily basis