Self-organizing distributed digital library supporting audio-video

The StreamOnTheFly network combines peer-to-peer networking and open-archive principles for community radio channels and TV stations in Europe. StreamOnTheFly demonstrates new methods of archive management and personalization technologies for both audio and video. It also provides a collaboration platform for community purposes that suits the flexible activity patterns of these kinds of broadcaster communities

A comparison of statistical machine learning methods in heartbeat detection and classification

In health care, patients with heart problems require quick responsiveness in a clinical setting or in the operating theatre. Towards that end, automated classification of heartbeats is vital as some heartbeat irregularities are time consuming to detect. Therefore, analysis of electro-cardiogram (ECG) signals is an active area of research. The methods proposed in the literature depend on the structure of a heartbeat cycle. In this paper, we use interval and amplitude based features together with a few samples from the ECG signal as a feature vector. We studied a variety of classification algorithms focused especially on a type of arrhythmia known as the ventricular ectopic fibrillation (VEB). We compare the performance of the classifiers against algorithms proposed in the literature and make recommendations regarding features, sampling rate, and choice of the classifier to apply in a real-time clinical setting. The extensive study is based on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. Our main contribution is the evaluation of existing classifiers over a range sampling rates, recommendation of a detection methodology to employ in a practical setting, and extend the notion of a mixture of experts to a larger class of algorithms

Rating the Audience

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals

Rating the Audience

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Knowing, measuring and understanding media audiences have become a multi-billion dollar business. But the convention that underpins that business, audience ratings, is in crisis. Rating the Audience is the first book to show why and how audience ratings research became a convention, an agreement, and the first to interrogate the ways that agreement is now under threat. Taking a historical approach, the book looks at the evolution of audience ratings and the survey industry. It goes on to analyse today's media environment, looking at the role of the internet and the increased difficulties it presents for measuring audiences. The book covers all the major players and controversies, such as Facebook's privacy rulings and Google's alliance with Nielsen. Offering the first real comparative study, it will be critical for media students and professionals

Automatic, context-of-capture based, categorization, structure detection and segmentation of news telecasts

Summarization: The objective of the work reported here is to provide an automatic, context-of-capture categorization, structure detection and segmentation of news broadcasts employing a multimodal semantic based approach. We assume that news broadcasts can be described with context-free grammars that specify their structural characteristics. We propose a system consisting of two main types of interoperating units: The recognizer unit consisting of several modules and a parser unit. The recognizer modules (audio, video and semantic recognizer) analyze the telecast and each one identifies hypothesized instances of features in the audiovisual input. A probabilistic parser analyzes the identifications provided by the recognizers. The grammar represents the possible structures a news telecast may have, so the parser can identify the exact structure of the analyzed telecast.Παρουσιάστηκε στο: First International DELOS Conference, Pisa

Genocide Rhetorics in US Popular Culture

Genocide is a notoriously difficult problem to define, represent, resolve, and remember. Popular cultural texts addressing genocide often showcase considerable inconsistency in their attempts to engage each of these four arenas. In part, the textual vacillations contained within such popular cultural treatments of genocide reflect extent tensions in scholarly discussions of atrocity. Both popular and scholarly discourses on genocide demonstrate a substantive ambivalence over the relationships among state authority, public agency, and genocidal violence. Genocide Rhetorics in US Popular Culture departs from existing work on atrocity concerned with the unstable relationships among state power, public power, and violence. Instead, this study centers on the competing ways popular cultural texts constitute state authority and public agency within their attempts to define, represent, resolve, and remember genocide. Because these texts commonly contain contradictory messages about each of these four topics, this study also looks at how these texts manage the palpable anxiety that arises from such textual incongruences. In the process, it spotlights genocidal discourse contained in two museums (the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) and one documentary (Daniel Goldhagen's Worse Than War), and is informed by the literature in rhetoric, critical/cultural studies, media studies, memory studies, as well as Holocaust and genocide studies. These texts distinctively manage the anxiety created by inconsistent assessments of state authority and public agency, working to sublimate, exacerbate, or recognize these tensions. Ultimately, the texts converge in validating state power on matters of genocide. Despite paying lip service to popular power, all three of the cases centralize the nation-state or empowered political actors as critical to genocide intervention or prevention. In spite of such shortcomings, this study concludes that the anxiety residing within these texts is productive in so far as it imparts messages about audience accountability and prompts critical reflection on issues of state power, public agency, and genocidal violenc