Axmedis 2005

The AXMEDIS conference aims to promote discussions and interactions among researchers, practitioners, developers and users of tools, technology transfer experts, and project managers, to bring together a variety of participants. The conference focuses on the challenges in the cross-media domain (which include production, protection, management, representation, formats, aggregation, workflow, distribution, business and transaction models), and the integration of content management systems and distribution chains, with particular emphasis on cost reduction and effective solutions for complex cross-domain problems

Rights and services interoperability for multimedia content management

The main goal of the work presented in this thesis is to describe the definition of interoperability mechanisms between rights expression languages and policy languages. Starting from languages interoperability, the intention is to go a step further and define how services for multimedia content management can interoperate by means of service-oriented generic and standardised architectures. In order to achieve this goal, several standards and existing initiatives will be analysed and taken into account. Regarding rights expression languages and policy languages, standards like MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language (REL), Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) are considered. Regarding services for content management, the Multimedia Information Protection And Management System (MIPAMS), a standards-based implemented architecture, and the Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), also known as MPEG-M standard, are considered. The contribution of this thesis is divided into two parts, one devoted to languages interoperability and the other one devoted to services interoperability, both addressed to multimedia content management. They are briefly described next. The first part of the contribution describes how MPEG-21 REL, ODRL and XACML can interoperate, defining the mapping mechanisms to translate expressions from language to language. The mappings provided have different levels of granularity, starting from a mapping based on a programmatic approach coming from high-level modelling diagrams done using Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Entity-Relationship (ER). The next level of mappings includes specific mappings between MPEG-21 REL and XACML and ODRL and XACML. Finally, a more general solution is proposed by using a broker. Part of this work was done in the context of the VISNET-II Network of Excellence and the AXMEDIS Integrated Project. The findings done prove the validity of the interoperability methods described. The second part of the contribution describes how to describe standards based building blocks to provide interoperable services for multimedia content management. This definition is based on the analysis of existing content management use cases, from the ones involving less security over multimedia content managed to the ones providing full-featured digital rights management (DRM) (including access control and ciphering techniques) to support secure content management. In this section it is also presented the work done in the research projects AXMEDIS, Musiteca and Culturalive. It is also shown the standardisation work done for MPEG-M, particularly on elementary services and service aggregation. To demonstrate the usage of both technologies a mobile application integrating both MPEG-M and MIPAMS is presented. Furthermore, some conclusions and future work is presented in the corresponding section, together with the refereed publications, which are briefly described in the document. In summary, the work presented can follow different research lines. On the one hand, further study on rights expression languages and policy languages is required as new versions of them have recently appeared. It is worth noting the standardisation of a contract expression language, MPEG-21 CEL, which has also to be further analysed in order to evaluate its interoperability with rights and policy languages. On the other hand, standard initiatives must be followed in order to complete the map of SB3's, considering MPEG standards and also other standards not only related to multimedia but also other application scenarios, like e-health or e-government

Hybrid Fixed-Mobile P2P Superdistribution

The Internet and the cellular telephony system are the two most influential communication systems of the last years. The arrival of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) promises to help service providers to deploy a complete array of real-time, customized business and consumer multimedia services over any access network. IMS is an integrated solution that defines a generic architecture for offering Voice over IP (VoIP) and advanced multimedia services. This project describes a hybrid fixed-mobile peer-to-peer superdistribution system deployed over an IMS platform. This superdistribution service is aligned with the current interests of telecommunication operators that desire to offer services with large user acceptance and that involve a massive access to the service without collapsing their network infrastructure. Operators can increase their revenues for connectivity and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-based license distribution of the multimedia content, depending on the content and on the desired business model

Traffic flow reconstruction by solving indeterminacy on traffic distribution at junctions

Abstract The knowledge of the real time traffic flow status in each segment of a whole road network in a city or area is becoming fundamental for a large number of smart services such as: routing, planning, dynamic tuning services, healthy walk, etc. Rescue teams, police department, and ambulances need to know with high precision the status of the network in real time. On the other hand, the costs to obtain this information either with direct measures meant to add instruments on the whole network or acquiring data from international providers such as Google, TomTom, etc. is very high. The traditional modeling and computing approaches are not satisfactory since they are based on many assumptions that typically are doomed to change over time, as it occurs with traffic distribution at junctions; in short they cannot cover the whole network with the needed precision. In this paper, the above problem has been addressed providing a solution granting any traffic flow reconstruction with high precision and solving the indeterminacy of traffic distribution at junctions for large networks. The identified solution can be classified as a stochastic relaxation technique and resulted affordable on a parallel architecture based on GPU. The result has been obtained in the framework of the Sii-Mobility national project on smart city transport systems in Italy, a very large research project, and it is at present exploited in a number of cities/regions across Europe and by a number of research projects (Snap4City, TRAFAIR) of the European Commission

Trust in Distributed small sized Data Centers

Abstract Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have large advantages over server-based solutions in terms of efficiency for bandwidth consumption and server workload. This is particularly relevant for the distribution of large volume content like multimedia data. This paper proposes a security architecture that provides essential security functionality for a platform enabling commercial P2P applications. One main characteristic of such a platform is, that the devices of the P2P network are not under the physical control of the owner. The proposed security and trust architecture includes solutions for integrity protection of data as well as for software on the device, exclusion of manipulated nodes from the network, and isolation between applications by different stakeholders residing in parallel on the same platform. All solutions can be build on existing secure hardware anchors as provided by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and its certification infrastructure

Trust in Peer-to-Peer content distribution protocols

Abstract. The distribution of virtual goods like multimedia data relies on the trustworthiness of the distribution system. Recent concepts for the distribution based on peer to peer networks like BitTorrent require new approaches to establish the needed level of trust in the overall functionality of the system. This paper explores the integration of hardware based trust concepts from the domain of Trusted Computing in the well know BitTorrent protocol suite

smart city iot platform respecting gdpr privacy and security aspects

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm enables computation and communication among tools that everyone uses daily. The vastness and heterogeneity of devices and their composition offer innovative services and scenarios that require a new challenging vision in interoperability, security and data management. Many IoT frameworks and platforms claimed to have solved these issues, aggregating different sources of information, combining their data flows in new innovative services, providing security robustness with respect to vulnerability and respecting the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) of the European Commission. Due to the potentially very sensible nature of some of these data, privacy and security aspects have to be taken into account by design and by default. In addition, an end-to-end secure solution has to guarantee a secure environment at the final users for their personal data, in transit and storage, which have to remain under their full control. In this paper, the Snap4City architecture and its security solutions that also respect the GDPR are presented. The Snap4City solution addresses the full stack security, ranging from IoT Devices, IoT Edge on premises, IoT Applications on the cloud and on premises, Data Analytics, and Dashboarding, presenting a number of integrated security solutions that go beyond the state of the art, as shown in the platform comparison. The stress test also included the adoption of penetrations tests verifying the robustness of the solution with respect to a large number of potential vulnerability aspects. The stress security assessments have been performed in a piloting period with more than 1200 registered users, thousands of processes per day, and more than 1.8 million of complex data ingested per day, in large cities such as Antwerp, Helsinki and the entire Tuscany region. Snap4City is a solution produced in response to a research challenge launched by the Select4Cities H2020 research and development project of the European Commission. Select4Cities identified a large number of requirements for modern Smart Cities that support IoT/IoE (Internet of Things/Everything) in the hands of public administrations and Living Labs, and selected a number of solutions. Consequently, at the end of the process after 3 years of work, Snap4City has been identified as the winning solution

Characterizing Movement Fluency in Musical Performance: Toward a Generic Measure for Technology Enhanced Learning

Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements. To this end, the movements of three cello players and three drummers at different levels of skill were recorded with an optical motion capture system, while a wireless electromyography (EMG) system recorded the corresponding muscle activity from relevant landmarks. We analyzed the kinematic and coarticulation characteristics of these recordings separately and then propose a combined model of fluency in musical performance predicting music sophistication. Results suggest that expert performers' movements are characterized by consistently smooth strokes and scaling of muscle phasic coactivation. The explored model of fluency as a function of movement smoothness and coarticulation patterns was shown to be limited by the sample size, but it serves as a proof of concept. Results from this study show the potential of a technology-enhanced objective measure of fluency in musical performance, which could lead to improved practices for aspiring musicians, instructors, and researchers

Automatically Detecting the Resonance of Terrorist Movement Frames on the Web

The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also presents new opportunities for the interdiction of lone wolf terrorism. This dissertation is an account of the development and evaluation of an information technology (IT) framework for detecting potentially radicalized individuals on social media sites and Web fora. Unifying Collective Action Framing Theory (CAFT) and a radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of propaganda documents produced by several, radically different, terror organizations. This analysis provides the building blocks to define a knowledge model of terrorist ideological framing that is implemented as a Semantic Web Ontology. Using several techniques for ontology guided information extraction, the resultant ontology can be accurately processed from textual data sources. This dissertation subsequently defines several techniques that leverage the populated ontological representation for automatically identifying individuals who are potentially radicalized to one or more terrorist ideologies based on their postings on social media and other Web fora. The dissertation also discusses how the ontology can be queried using intuitive structured query languages to infer triggering events in the news. The prototype system is evaluated in the context of classification and is shown to provide state of the art results. The main outputs of this research are (1) an ontological model of terrorist ideologies (2) an information extraction framework capable of identifying and extracting terrorist ideologies from text, (3) a classification methodology for classifying Web content as resonating the ideology of one or more terrorist groups and (4) a methodology for rapidly identifying news content of relevance to one or more terrorist groups