Ambient Multi-Camera Personal Documentary

Polymnia is an automated solution for the creation of ambient multi-camera personal documentary films. This short paper introduces the system, emphasising the rule-based documentary generation engine that we have created to assemble an edited narrative from source footage. We describe how such automatically generated media can be integrated with and augment personally-authored images and videos as a contribution to an individual’s personal digital memory

Multiple multimodal mobile devices: Lessons learned from engineering lifelog solutions

For lifelogging, or the recording of one’s life history through digital means, to be successful, a range of separate multimodal mobile devices must be employed. These include smartphones such as the N95, the Microsoft SenseCam – a wearable passive photo capture device, or wearable biometric devices. Each collects a facet of the bigger picture, through, for example, personal digital photos, mobile messages and documents access history, but unfortunately, they operate independently and unaware of each other. This creates significant challenges for the practical application of these devices, the use and integration of their data and their operation by a user. In this chapter we discuss the software engineering challenges and their implications for individuals working on integration of data from multiple ubiquitous mobile devices drawing on our experiences working with such technology over the past several years for the development of integrated personal lifelogs. The chapter serves as an engineering guide to those considering working in the domain of lifelogging and more generally to those working with multiple multimodal devices and integration of their data

Information access tasks and evaluation for personal lifelogs

Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals’ daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one’s life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating

How can I produce a digital video artefact to facilitate greater understanding among youth workers of their own learning-to-learn competence?

In Ireland, youth work is delivered largely in marginalised communities and through non-formal and informal learning methods. Youth workers operate in small isolated organisations without many of the resources and structures to improve practice that is afforded to larger formal educational establishments. Fundamental to youth work practice is the ability to identify and construct learning experiences for young people in non-traditional learning environments. It is therefore necessary for youth workers to develop a clear understanding of their own learning capacity in order to facilitate learning experiences for young people. In the course of this research, I attempted to use technology to enhance and support the awareness among youth workers of their own learning capacity by creating a digital video artifact that explores the concept – learning-to-learn. This study presents my understanding of the learning-to-learn competence as, I sought to improve my practice as a youth service manager and youth work trainer. This study was conducted using an action research approach. I designed and evaluated the digital media artifact – “Lenny’s Quest” in collaboration with staff and trainer colleagues in the course of two cycles of action research, and my research was critiqued and validated throughout this process

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

IAPMA 2011: 2nd Workshop on information access to personal media archives

Towards e-Memories: challenges of capturing, summarising, presenting, understanding, using, and retrieving relevant information from heterogeneous data contained in personal media archives. Welcome to IAPMA 2011, the second international workshop on "Information Access for Personal Media Archives". It is now possible to archive much of our life experiences in digital form using a variety of sources, e.g. blogs written, tweets made, social network status updates, photographs taken, videos seen, music heard, physiological monitoring, locations visited and environmentally sensed data of those places, details of people met, etc. Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices including desktop computers, PDAs, digital cameras, video and audio recorders, and various sensors, including GPS, Bluetooth, and biometric devices