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M-Libraries: Information use on the move
When people talk about mobile libraries, they tend to mean a bus or truck that has been kitted out as a roving branch library. However with a growing number of people accessing the internet from their pocket PCs and mobile phones, libraries are investigating ways to deliver their services to mobile phones and other small-screen devices so their customers can access them any time anywhere. This can be as simple as sending text message alerts about reservations becoming available or overdue books, or as complex as the Athabasca University Libraryâs Digital Reading room, which allows readers to access full eBooks and journal articles through their libraryâs subscriptions on any mobile device. These services have collectively become known as âm-librariesâ.The Arcadia Programme has been funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk
Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients
Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE
Web Mediators for Accessible Browsing
We present a highly accurate method for classifying web pages based on link percentage, which is the percentage of text characters that are parts of links normalized by the number of all text characters on a web page. K-means clustering is used to create unique thresholds to differentiate index pages and article pages on individual web sites. Index pages contain mostly links to articles and other indices, while article pages contain mostly text. We also present a novel link grouping algorithm using agglomerative hierarchical clustering that groups links in the same spatial neighborhood together while preserving link structure. Grouping allows users with severe disabilities to use a scan-based mechanism to tab through a web page and select items. In experiments, we saw up to a 40-fold reduction in the number of commands needed to click on a link with a scan-based interface, which shows that we can vastly improve the rate of communication for users with disabilities. We used web page classification and link grouping to alter web page display on an accessible web browser that we developed to make a usable browsing interface for users with disabilities. Our classification method consistently outperformed a baseline classifier even when using minimal data to generate article and index clusters, and achieved classification accuracy of 94.0% on web sites with well-formed or slightly malformed HTML, compared with 80.1% accuracy for the baseline classifier.National Science Foundation (IIS-0308213, IIS-039009, IIS-0093367, P200A01031, EIA-0202067
Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review
We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video dataâwhich, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costlyâhave become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other
The FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories system: personalised access to an archive of TV news
The âFĂschlĂĄrâ systems are a family of tools for capturing, analysis, indexing, browsing, searching and summarisation of digital video information. FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories, described in this paper, is one of those systems, and provides access to a growing archive of broadcast TV news. FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories has several notable features including the fact that it automatically records TV news and segments a broadcast news program into stories, eliminating advertisements and credits at the start/end of the broadcast. FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories supports access to individual stories via calendar lookup, text search through closed captions, automatically-generated links between related stories, and personalised access using a personalisation and recommender system based on collaborative filtering. Access to individual news stories is supported either by browsing keyframes with synchronised closed captions, or by playback of the recorded video. One strength of the FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories system is that it is actually used, in practice, daily, to access news. Several aspects of the FĂschlĂĄr systems have been published before, bit in this paper we give a summary of the FĂschlĂĄr-News-Stories system in operation by following a scenario in which it is used and also outlining how the underlying system realises the functions it offers
Interactive product browsing and configuration using remote augmented reality sales services
Real-time remote sales assistance is an underdeveloped component of online sales services. Solutions involving web page text chat, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with configurations of physically complex artefacts. Recently, there has been great interest in the application of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments for remote sales of physical artefacts. However, there is a lack of analysis and development of appropriate software services to support these processes. We extend our previous work with the detailed design of configuration context services to support the management of an interactive sales session using augmented reality. We detail the context and configuration services required, presenting a novel data service streaming configuration information to the vendor for business analytics. We expect that a fully implemented configuration management service, based on our design, will improve the remote sales experience for both customers and vendors alike via analysis of the streamed information
CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap
After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in
multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year.
In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio-
economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown
of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on
requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the
community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our
Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as
National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core
technological gaps that involve research challenges, and âenablersâ, which are not necessarily technical research
challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal
challenges
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