New Media Art/ New Funding Models

Investigates the current state of funding for new media artists, with an emphasis on the support structures for innovative creative work that utilizes advanced technologies as the main vehicle for artistic practice

Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1

Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences

From classroom tutor to hypertext adviser: An evaluation

This paper describes a three‐year experiment to investigate the possibility of making economies by replacing practical laboratory sessions with courseware while attempting to ensure that the quality of the student learning experience did not suffer. Pathology labs are a central component of the first‐year medical undergraduate curriculum at Southampton. Activities in these labs had been carefully designed and they were supervised by lab demonstrators who were subject domain experts. The labs were successful in the eyes of both staff and students but were expensive to conduct, in terms of equipment and staffing. Year by year evaluation of the introduction of courseware revealed that there was no measurable difference in student performance as a result of introducing the courseware, but that students were unhappy about the loss of interaction with the demonstrators. The final outcome of this experiment was a courseware replacement for six labs which included a software online hypertext adviser. The contribution of this work is that it adds to the body of empirical evidence in support of the importance of maintaining dialogue with students when introducing courseware, and it presents an example of how this interaction might be achieved in software

CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

Minutes of the following Workshops: • National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. • Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search

DIY networking as a facilitator for interdisciplinary research on the hybrid city

DIY networking is a technology with special characteristics compared to the public Internet, which holds a unique potential for empowering citizens to shape their hybrid urban space toward conviviality and collective awareness. It can also play the role of a “boundary object” for facilitating interdisciplinary interactions and participatory processes between different actors: researchers, engineers, practitioners, artists, designers, local authorities, and activists. This position paper presents a social learning framework, the DIY networking paradigm, that we aim to put in the centre of the hybrid space design process. We first introduce our individual views on the role of design as discussed in the fields of engineering, urban planning, urban interaction design, design research, and community informatics. We then introduce a simple methodology for combining these diverse perspectives into a meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, through a series of related events with different structure and framing. We conclude with a short summary of a selection of these events, which serves also as an introduction to the CONTACT workshop on facilitating information sharing between strangers, in the context of the Hybrid City III conference

Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Money: Technology-Based Art and the Dynamics of Sustainability

Proposes innovative new approaches and models for art and technology institutions, and provides details for an "Arts Lab," a unique hybrid art center and research lab