OMUS : an optimized multimedia service for the home environment

Media content in home environments is often scattered across multiple devices in the home network. As both the available multimedia devices in the home (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops, game consoles, etc.) and the available content (video and audio) is increasing, interconnecting desired content with available devices is becoming harder and home users are experiencing difficulties in selecting interesting content for their current context. In this paper, we start with an analysis of the home environment by means of a user study. Information handling problems are identified and requirements for a home information system formulated. To meet these requirements we propose the OMUS home information system which includes an optimized content aggregation framework, a hybrid group-based contextual recommender system, and an overall web-based user interface making both content and recommendations available for all devices across the home network. For the group recommendations we introduced distinct weights for each user and showed that by varying the weights, the coverage (i.e., items that can be returned by the recommender) considerably increases. Also the addition of genre filter functionality was proven to further boost the coverage. The OMUS system was evaluated by means of focus groups and by qualitative and quantitative performance assessment of individual parts of the system. The modularity of internal components and limited imposed hardware requirements implies flexibility as to how the OMUS system can be deployed (ranging from e.g., embedded in hardware devices or more software services based)

Architectures réseaux pour le partage de contenus multimédias avec garantie de qualité de service

Le succès des services de partage de contenus multimédias sur internet témoigne de l'intérêt des utilisateurs à partager leurs expériences personnelles à travers des fichiers multimédias (photo, vidéo, musique). Les solutions actuelles sont basées essentiellement sur des serveurs web et souffrent d'un manque de QoS, de sécurité et de confidentialité. Plusieurs travaux de recherche ont été menés pour proposer des architectures réseaux d'accès à distance pour de tels services. Ils sont soit trop complexes pour être utilisés par des services dédiés au grand public, soit inadaptés au contexte de partage de contenus. Dans cette thèse nous présentons un système de mise en relation réseau entre équipements distants pour permettre l'échange de contenus multimédias, ceci en garantissant à la fois la sécurité, la confidentialité et la qualité de service. Étant donné que ces contenus sont gourmands en ressources réseaux, le système proposera une garantie de QoS de bout en bout pour les sessions établies. Il offrira également une sécurisation de la mise en relation et des échanges. Nous avons défini une architecture générique de notre système. Ensuite, nous avons proposé deux déclinaisons techniques, leur conception et leur implémentation, une première utilisant le Framework IMS (IP Multimédia Subsystem) et une deuxième adaptée au déploiement sur internet. Le système conçu constitue la brique réseau du service de partage de contenus à distance étudié dans le cadre du projet européen Feel@Home (" Full Extended Experience of living at Home ").The success of multimedia content sharing services on the Internet attests the users' interest to share their personal experiences through media files (photo, video, music). Current solutions are mainly based on web servers and suffer from a serious lack of security and privacy. Several research studies have been conducted to provide network remote access architectures for this service. They are either very complicated to use by services dedicated to the public, or inappropriate for the context of content sharing. This thesis presents a set of architectures and systems for network session establishment between remote devices to exchange multimedia content, which guarantees security, confidentiality and QoS. As the multimedia contents can be greedy in network resources, the system will guaranteed an end to end QoS for session established. It will also secure the session establishment and content exchange. We have defined two generic architectures for such a system. Then we have proposed two technical realizations for these architectures, one using the Framework IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) and a second one adapted to the deployment on the Internet. Our system was integrated to the remote content sharing service studied in the european project Feel@Home ("Full Extended Experience of Living at Home")