Smartphone picture organization: a hierarchical approach

We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.Peer ReviewedPreprin

The roles of tagging in the online curation of photographs

This paper explores the variety of uses people make of the tagging feature on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The site developers intended uses are primarily to build a taxonomy to make the images on the site easily searchable. Data from examples of Flickr tags and interviews with selected users reveal that some tagging fits with this aim, whilst other uses challenge and subvert the intended uses. Tagging is used to do at least the following: identifying existing information in a photo; adding relevant new information; expressing affective stance towards the images; addressing specific audiences; making unrelated ‘asides’; and for creative play. The discussion is then broadened by examining a dispute between Flickr and its users about changes being made to the site: this act as a ‘telling case’ (Mitchell, 1984) as people articulate what the site enables them to do and what it hinders. The dispute generated a thread of more than 29,000 comments, making a corpus of 1,774,401 words. Using corpus linguistics tools the paper demonstrates how users contribute to curating this site, including their uses of tagging. Steps involved in curating the site are identified, including a focus on verbs of curation. Overall, the paper contributes to the analysis of a set of ‘new’ literacy practices and to understanding digital curation. The methods of the two studies reported here productively combine detailed methods of qualitative research with the breadth of quantitative analysis

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen