Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives

Semantic multimedia modelling & interpretation for annotation

The emergence of multimedia enabled devices, particularly the incorporation of cameras in mobile phones, and the accelerated revolutions in the low cost storage devices, boosts the multimedia data production rate drastically. Witnessing such an iniquitousness of digital images and videos, the research community has been projecting the issue of its significant utilization and management. Stored in monumental multimedia corpora, digital data need to be retrieved and organized in an intelligent way, leaning on the rich semantics involved. The utilization of these image and video collections demands proficient image and video annotation and retrieval techniques. Recently, the multimedia research community is progressively veering its emphasis to the personalization of these media. The main impediment in the image and video analysis is the semantic gap, which is the discrepancy among a user’s high-level interpretation of an image and the video and the low level computational interpretation of it. Content-based image and video annotation systems are remarkably susceptible to the semantic gap due to their reliance on low-level visual features for delineating semantically rich image and video contents. However, the fact is that the visual similarity is not semantic similarity, so there is a demand to break through this dilemma through an alternative way. The semantic gap can be narrowed by counting high-level and user-generated information in the annotation. High-level descriptions of images and or videos are more proficient of capturing the semantic meaning of multimedia content, but it is not always applicable to collect this information. It is commonly agreed that the problem of high level semantic annotation of multimedia is still far from being answered. This dissertation puts forward approaches for intelligent multimedia semantic extraction for high level annotation. This dissertation intends to bridge the gap between the visual features and semantics. It proposes a framework for annotation enhancement and refinement for the object/concept annotated images and videos datasets. The entire theme is to first purify the datasets from noisy keyword and then expand the concepts lexically and commonsensical to fill the vocabulary and lexical gap to achieve high level semantics for the corpus. This dissertation also explored a novel approach for high level semantic (HLS) propagation through the images corpora. The HLS propagation takes the advantages of the semantic intensity (SI), which is the concept dominancy factor in the image and annotation based semantic similarity of the images. As we are aware of the fact that the image is the combination of various concepts and among the list of concepts some of them are more dominant then the other, while semantic similarity of the images are based on the SI and concept semantic similarity among the pair of images. Moreover, the HLS exploits the clustering techniques to group similar images, where a single effort of the human experts to assign high level semantic to a randomly selected image and propagate to other images through clustering. The investigation has been made on the LabelMe image and LabelMe video dataset. Experiments exhibit that the proposed approaches perform a noticeable improvement towards bridging the semantic gap and reveal that our proposed system outperforms the traditional systems

Understanding video through the lens of language

The increasing abundance of video data online necessitates the development of systems capable of understanding such content. However, building these systems poses significant challenges, including the absence of scalable and robust supervision signals, computational complexity, and multimodal modelling. To address these issues, this thesis explores the role of language as a complementary learning signal for video, drawing inspiration from the success of self-supervised Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-language models. First, joint video-language representations are examined under the text-to-video retrieval task. This includes the study of pre-extracted multimodal features, the influence of contextual information, joint end-to-end learning of both image and video representations, and various frame aggregation methods for long-form videos. In doing so, state-of-the-art performance is achieved across a range of established video-text benchmarks. Second, this work explores the automatic generation of audio description (AD) – narrations describing the visual happenings in a video, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. An LLM, prompted with multimodal information, including past predictions, and pretrained with partial data sources, is employed for the task. In the process, substantial advancements are achieved in the following areas: efficient speech transcription, long-form visual storytelling, referencing character names, and AD time-point prediction. Finally, audiovisual behaviour recognition is applied to the field of wildlife conservation and ethology. The approach is used to analyse vast video archives of wild primates, revealing insights into individual and group behaviour variations, with the potential for monitoring the effects of human pressures on animal habitats

Yoruba Culture and Its Influence on The Development of Modern Popular Music in Nigeria

This thesis focuses on the contributions of the Yorùbá culture to the development of modern Nigerian popular music. It traces the origin, conception and growth of popular music styles in Nigeria and highlights the underlying Yorùbá cultural cum linguistic influence that nurtured their growth within the urban space of Lagos city. It examines how contemporary Nigerian popular music practitioners appropriate the Yorùbá culture in negotiating their musical and national identities and counteract popular music homogenization through the creation of hybrid musical styles and cultures. The work adopts a multi-dimensional research approach that involves cultural, musicological, historical, anthropological and socio-linguistical tools. Adopting the participant-observer method with Lagos as the primary fieldwork site, additional data were sourced along with interviews of key informants through bibliographic and discographic methods. The study reveals the importance of Lagos as a major factor that contributed to the development of Nigeria‘s popular music practice as exemplified in genres like jùjú, fújì and afrobeat, and discovers that the Yorùbá language has gradually become the dominant medium through which artists express their musical identity as typified by current mainstream hip hop music. Extending earlier work by scholars such as Barber, Waterman and Euba and recent works in hip hop linguistics by Alim and Omoniyi, the thesis contributes to the growing body of research within popular music through the discipline of ethnomusicology, especially in the emerging area of academic inquiry into indigenous African hip hop culture

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Excellentia Eminentia Effectio

"In these pages you will learn about the fascinating research endeavors that each of our faculty members is undertaking. We have divided their research into the broad categories of health, sustainability, information, and systems. While we recognize the imperfect nature of categorizing research that, by its very nature may be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, we nonetheless believe it will be helpful as a way to see the depth and breadth of our research endeavors within each grouping. As you read the profiles on these pages, I know you will begin to appreciate that, taken as a whole, the research spectrum at Columbia Engineering is exceptional and that, as our professors go about their work, they are at the cusp of making breakthroughs that will have a major impact on the way we live our lives today and tomorrow.

The Ithacan, 2003-04-17

https://digitalcommons.ithaca.edu/ithacan_2002-3/1026/thumbnail.jp

NPR\u27S TINY DESK CONCERT SERIES: VOCALITIES OF OUTRAGE AND ACTS OF GAIETY

The Tiny Desk concert series features live video-recorded performances of artists at the desk of NPR Music’s Bob Boilen, the series’ main host. This thesis interrogates NPR Music’s values and the ways artists both manifest and queer those ideals in performance. I argue, in light of the 2016 election, performers challenge NPR Music’s taste system through two modes of subversion. The first mode considers vocalities of outrage specifically in the performances of Saul Williams and the Drive-By Truckers. These performers shift their social positions in expressions of outrage through vocality—as the embodied materiality of the voice and its constructed meanings (Freya Jarman-Ivens, 2011). The second mode considers acts of gaiety (Sara Warner, 2012), which sustain struggles for social change. These musical acts are shown in the performances of Common and Troker, who use moments of unexpected release to further engage their audience