Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements

Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions. Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure the importance of each of these information channels by systematically incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, CO, US

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

The Role of Ethological Observation for Measuring Animal Reactions to Biotelemetry Devices

This paper presents a methodological approach used to assess the wearability of biotelemetry devices in animals. A detailed protocol to gather quantitative and qualitative ethological observations was adapted and tested in an experimental study of 13 cat participants wearing two different GPS devices. The aim was twofold: firstly, to ascertain the potential interference generated by the devices on the animal body and behavior by quantifying and characterizing it; secondly, to individuate device features potentially responsible for the influence registered, and establish design requirements. This research contributes towards the development of a framework for evaluating the design of wearer-centered biotelemetry interventions for animals, consistent with values advocated by Animal- Computer Interaction researchers