Automatic movie analysis and summarisation

Automatic movie analysis is the task of employing Machine Learning methods to the field of screenplays, movie scripts, and motion pictures to facilitate or enable various tasks throughout the entirety of a movie’s life-cycle. From helping with making informed decisions about a new movie script with respect to aspects such as its originality, similarity to other movies, or even commercial viability, all the way to offering consumers new and interesting ways of viewing the final movie, many stages in the life-cycle of a movie stand to benefit from Machine Learning techniques that promise to reduce human effort, time, or both. Within this field of automatic movie analysis, this thesis addresses the task of summarising the content of screenplays, enabling users at any stage to gain a broad understanding of a movie from greatly reduced data. The contributions of this thesis are four-fold: (i)We introduce ScriptBase, a new large-scale data set of original movie scripts, annotated with additional meta-information such as genre and plot tags, cast information, and log- and tag-lines. To our knowledge, Script- Base is the largest data set of its kind, containing scripts and information for almost 1,000 Hollywood movies. (ii) We present a dynamic summarisation model for the screenplay domain, which allows for extraction of highly informative and important scenes from movie scripts. The extracted summaries allow for the content of the original script to stay largely intact and provide the user with its important parts, while greatly reducing the script-reading time. (iii) We extend our summarisation model to capture additional modalities beyond the screenplay text. The model is rendered multi-modal by introducing visual information obtained from the actual movie and by extracting scenes from the movie, allowing users to generate visual summaries of motion pictures. (iv) We devise a novel end-to-end neural network model for generating natural language screenplay overviews. This model enables the user to generate short descriptive and informative texts that capture certain aspects of a movie script, such as its genres, approximate content, or style, allowing them to gain a fast, high-level understanding of the screenplay. Multiple automatic and human evaluations were carried out to assess the performance of our models, demonstrating that they are well-suited for the tasks set out in this thesis, outperforming strong baselines. Furthermore, the ScriptBase data set has started to gain traction, and is currently used by a number of other researchers in the field to tackle various tasks relating to screenplays and their analysis

Smoking prevention, peer support and social networks: diffusion of the ASSIST programme beyond the school setting

Background: A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial (ASSIST) is a social network intervention designed to disseminate non-smoking messages among secondary school children via student selected peer supporters. Message diffusion is restricted to the school year, with limited understanding of the extent and context of message diffusion in peer supporters’ wider social networks. The aim of this thesis was to address this gap by examining whether ASSIST had the potential to influence smoking behaviour, attitudes, and knowledge of smoking related harm, beyond the school year. Method: Two literature reviews and a systematic review were conducted to inform the empirical data collection phase, which employed a qualitative social network design using a mixed methods analytical approach. A novel research method to collect data from young people (egocentric sociograms using coloured dots and post-it notes to prompt further discussion) and recruitment approach were piloted with 16 peer supporters from two secondary schools. Network data was quantitatively analysed using Excel and qualitative data from the interviews was analysed thematically using NVivo and Framework. Results: The potential reach of message diffusion among the 16 peer supporter networks was large, with the combined number of people nominated being 151. The actual number of reported conversations was 103. Two-fifths (41%) of these conversations were with school friends and three-fifths (59%) with peer supporter family and friends outside of school. Thematic analysis of reported conversation content revealed three main types of conversation: protecting non-smokers from starting to smoke; encouraging smokers to stop; and protecting people from secondhand smoke in wider social networks. Peer supporters perceived impact with 37 people from their social networks, with examples of both positive and negative impact, focusing on the dynamics of a child speaking to an adult. Conclusions: Smoking prevention message diffusion was not limited to the school year, reaching into the wider networks of peer supporters. Future interventions using the ASSIST model should consider changing the guidance that message diffusion should be limited to students in their year group only, as this may reduce the extent of message diffusion. Peer supporters should be better supported to think about whom they could speak to in their social network and the associated potential risks and ethical implications carefully considered

The Conscience of Cinema

The Conscience of Cinema is not only a history of a rich and varied personal oeuvre by a prolific documentary maker who worked on every continent and through seven decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s. It is also the history of the aspiration to use documentary film to change the world by a committed leftist, as well as a microcosmic history of documentary form, technology and culture, and its place within world cinema as a whole throughout the twentieth century. Ivens worked in almost every genre of documentary, including the essay, compilation, hybrid dramatization, direct cinema, social observation, the solidarity film, socialist realism, agitprop activism. In this book, detailed filmic analysis is enriched by a profound historical understanding of the contexts in which Ivens carried out his vision, from his native Netherlands to the Soviet bloc, USA, France, Latin America, Vietnam and finally China. Everywhere, Joris Ivens left an indelible artistic and political mark, critically relevant to a twenty-first century where documentary has reclaimed its cultural and political centrality. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline