MovieRemix: Having Fun Playing with Videos

The process of producing new creative videos by editing, combining, and organizing pre-existing material (e.g., video shots) is a popular phenomenon in the current web scenario. Known as remix or video remix, the produced videomay have new and different meanings with respect to the sourcematerial. Unfortunately, whenmanaging audiovisual objects, the technological aspect can be a burden for many creative users.Motivated by the large success of the gaming market, we propose a novel game and an architecture to make the remix process a pleasant and stimulating gaming experience. MovieRemix allows people to act like amovie director, butinstead of dealing with cast and cameras, the player has to create a remixed video starting from a given screenplay and from video shots retrieved from the provided catalog. MovieRemix is not a simple video editing tool nor is a simple game: it is a challenging environment that stimulates creativity. To temp to play the game, players can access different levels of screenplay (original, outline, derived) and can also challenge other players. Computational and storage issues are kept at the server side, whereas the client device just needs to have the capability of playing streaming videos

Determining Solution Space Characteristics for Real-Time Strategy Games and Characterizing Winning Strategies

The underlying goal of a competing agent in a discrete real-time strategy (RTS) game is to defeat an adversary. Strategic agents or participants must define an a priori plan to maneuver their resources in order to destroy the adversary and the adversary\u27s resources as well as secure physical regions of the environment. This a priori plan can be generated by leveraging collected historical knowledge about the environment. This knowledge is then employed in the generation of a classification model for real-time decision-making in the RTS domain. The best way to generate a classification model for a complex problem domain depends on the characteristics of the solution space. An experimental method to determine solution space (search landscape) characteristics is through analysis of historical algorithm performance for solving the specific problem. We select a deterministic search technique and a stochastic search method for a priori classification model generation. These approaches are designed, implemented, and tested for a specific complex RTS game, Bos Wars. Their performance allows us to draw various conclusions about applying a competing agent in complex search landscapes associated with RTS games

Epitomize Your Photos

With the rapid growth of digital photography, sharing of photos with friends and family has become very popular. When people share their photos, they usually organize them in albums according to events or places. To tell the story of some important events in one's life, it is desirable to have an efficient summarization tool which can help people to receive a quick overview of an album containing huge number of photos. In this paper, we present and analyze an approach for photo album summarization through a novel social game ``Epitome'' as a Facebook application. This social game can collect research data and, at the same time, it provides a collage or a cover photo of the user's photo album, while the user enjoys playing the game. The proof of concept of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on several photo albums. As a benchmark comparison to this game, we perform automatic visual analysis considering several state-of-the-art features. We also evaluate the usability of the game by making use of a questionnaire on several subjects who played "Epitome" game. Furthermore, we address privacy issues concerning shared photos in Facebook applications