ROTUNDE - A Smart Meeting Cinematography Initiative: Tools, Datasets, and Benchmarks for Cognitive Interpretation and Control

We construe smart meeting cinematography with a focus on professional situations such as meetings and seminars, possibly conducted in a distributed manner across socio-spatially separated groups. The basic objective in smart meeting cinematography is to interpret professional interactions involving people, and automatically produce dynamic recordings of discussions, debates, presentations etc in the presence of multiple communication modalities. Typical modalities include gestures (e.g., raising one's hand for a question, applause), voice and interruption, electronic apparatus (e.g., pressing a button), movement (e.g., standing-up, moving around) etc. ROTUNDE, an instance of smart meeting cinematography concept, aims to: (a) develop functionality-driven benchmarks with respect to the interpretation and control capabilities of human-cinematographers, real-time video editors, surveillance personnel, and typical human performance in everyday situations; (b) Develop general tools for the commonsense cognitive interpretation of dynamic scenes from the viewpoint of visuo-spatial cognition centred perceptual narrativisation. Particular emphasis is placed on declarative representations and interfacing mechanisms that seamlessly integrate within large-scale cognitive (interaction) systems and companion technologies consisting of diverse AI sub-components. For instance, the envisaged tools would provide general capabilities for high-level commonsense reasoning about space, events, actions, change, and interaction.Comment: Appears in AAAI-2013 Workshop on: Space, Time, and Ambient Intelligence (STAMI 2013

The reception of Hungarian cinema in Polish film criticism 1945–1989

In the years 1945–1989, a reader interested in Hungarian cinema could learn a lot about it from the Polish press, not only film-specific, although the number of publications devoted to this subject differed across time. The most prolific period was the sixties and seventies, mainly due to the contemporary achievements of the Hungarian cinema, as well as Polish critics’ enthusiasm for it. It is not difficult to notice certain recurrent phrases and motifs etc. Hungarian cinema gained acclaim several years ago, but how is it thought of today? Historical and political themes, as well as comparisons between Hungarian and Polish cinema have been noted.This book was financially supported by the National Programme for the Development of Humanities: project “Cinema: Intercultural Perspective. Western-European Cinema in Poland, Polish Cinema in Western Europe. Mutual Perception of Film Cultures (1918–1939)”

Optical network technologies for future digital cinema

Digital technology has transformed the information flow and support infrastructure for numerous application domains, such as cellular communications. Cinematography, traditionally, a film based medium, has embraced digital technology leading to innovative transformations in its work flow. Digital cinema supports transmission of high resolution content enabled by the latest advancements in optical communications and video compression. In this paper we provide a survey of the optical network technologies for supporting this bandwidth intensive traffic class. We also highlight the significance and benefits of the state of the art in optical technologies that support the digital cinema work flow

Formation of viable cell fragments by treatment with colchicine

Time-lapse cinematography of human fibroblasts revealed that mitotic cells separated into numerous cell fragments containing varying amounts of chromatin and cytoplasm when treated with colchicine. As cell fragments were very loosely attached to the surface of the culture vessel during their formation, they could be easily detached like mitotic cells by gently shaking the vessel and thus separated from normal interphase cells. Fragments obtained by this procedure were able to exclude trypan blue indicating, therefore, an intact cell membrane. When placed into Petri dishes many of them attached to and even spread out on the surface. Five hours later the majority of the attached fragments incorporated [3H]leucine. Time-lapse films showed that fragments were able to extend and retract pseudopodia at least for several hours after their formation. Although the fragments degenerated within a few days, in the present experiments the possibility was not excluded that fragments which had lost only a very small amount of chromatin and cytoplasm survived for longer periods of time. The observations clearly indicate viability of many newly formed fragments

Museums of Łódź as an Element of Tourism Space and the Connection between Museums and the City’s Tourism Image

This article deals with the museum potential of Łódź. The first sections describe the kinds and significance of museums, their location in the city and the attractiveness of their collections, premises and organized events. The following sections describe the significance of museums in regard to attendance and the city’s tourism image

Sensory Screens, Digitized Desires: Dancing Rasa From Bombay Cinema To Reality TV

Bombay cinema incorporated songs, dances, choreography, staging, and costumes from a variety of traditional forms to mark a modern national identity. The pioneering figure for using dance in films was Uday Shankar in his experimental film Kalpana. Bombay’s spectacular song-and-dance cinema then moves through films such as Chandralekha to contemporary Bollywood and its byproducts such as dance reality shows. The search for aesthetic modernity in India is embodied in the concept of “desire” as it evolved from traditional aesthetics to contemporary culture and new media technology; to uncover its evolution from Bombay cinema to reality show, I first analyze the historically transforming cinematography and content through a few select musicals. Secondly, I trace the emergence of the “Item” numbers in Bollywood and their relationship to music videos; and third, I explore the current expressions of screendance on reality shows in India as expressions of class mobility and democratization of cultur