Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Persönliche Wege der Interaktion mit multimedialen Inhalten

Today the world of multimedia is almost completely device- and content-centered. It focuses it’s energy nearly exclusively on technical issues such as computing power, network specifics or content and device characteristics and capabilities. In most multimedia systems, the presentation of multimedia content and the basic controls for playback are main issues. Because of this, a very passive user experience, comparable to that of traditional TV, is most often provided. In the face of recent developments and changes in the realm of multimedia and mass media, this ”traditional” focus seems outdated. The increasing use of multimedia content on mobile devices, along with the continuous growth in the amount and variety of content available, make necessary an urgent re-orientation of this domain. In order to highlight the depth of the increasingly difficult situation faced by users of such systems, it is only logical that these individuals be brought to the center of attention. In this thesis we consider these trends and developments by applying concepts and mechanisms to multimedia systems that were first introduced in the domain of usercentrism. Central to the concept of user-centrism is that devices should provide users with an easy way to access services and applications. Thus, the current challenge is to combine mobility, additional services and easy access in a single and user-centric approach. This thesis presents a framework for introducing and supporting several of the key concepts of user-centrism in multimedia systems. Additionally, a new definition of a user-centric multimedia framework has been developed and implemented. To satisfy the user’s need for mobility and flexibility, our framework makes possible seamless media and service consumption. The main aim of session mobility is to help people cope with the increasing number of different devices in use. Using a mobile agent system, multimedia sessions can be transferred between different devices in a context-sensitive way. The use of the international standard MPEG-21 guarantees extensibility and the integration of content adaptation mechanisms. Furthermore, a concept is presented that will allow for individualized and personalized selection and face the need for finding appropriate content. All of which can be done, using this approach, in an easy and intuitive way. Especially in the realm of television, the demand that such systems cater to the need of the audience is constantly growing. Our approach combines content-filtering methods, state-of-the-art classification techniques and mechanisms well known from the area of information retrieval and text mining. These are all utilized for the generation of recommendations in a promising new way. Additionally, concepts from the area of collaborative tagging systems are also used. An extensive experimental evaluation resulted in several interesting findings and proves the applicability of our approach. In contrast to the ”lean-back” experience of traditional media consumption, interactive media services offer a solution to make possible the active participation of the audience. Thus, we present a concept which enables the use of interactive media services on mobile devices in a personalized way. Finally, a use case for enriching TV with additional content and services demonstrates the feasibility of this concept.Die heutige Welt der Medien und der multimedialen Inhalte ist nahezu ausschließlich inhalts- und geräteorientiert. Im Fokus verschiedener Systeme und Entwicklungen stehen oft primär die Art und Weise der Inhaltspräsentation und technische Spezifika, die meist geräteabhängig sind. Die zunehmende Menge und Vielfalt an multimedialen Inhalten und der verstärkte Einsatz von mobilen Geräten machen ein Umdenken bei der Konzeption von Multimedia Systemen und Frameworks dringend notwendig. Statt an eher starren und passiven Konzepten, wie sie aus dem TV Umfeld bekannt sind, festzuhalten, sollte der Nutzer in den Fokus der multimedialen Konzepte rücken. Um dem Nutzer im Umgang mit dieser immer komplexeren und schwierigen Situation zu helfen, ist ein Umdenken im grundlegenden Paradigma des Medienkonsums notwendig. Durch eine Fokussierung auf den Nutzer kann der beschriebenen Situation entgegengewirkt werden. In der folgenden Arbeit wird auf Konzepte aus dem Bereich Nutzerzentrierung zurückgegriffen, um diese auf den Medienbereich zu übertragen und sie im Sinne einer stärker nutzerspezifischen und nutzerorientierten Ausrichtung einzusetzen. Im Fokus steht hierbei der TV-Bereich, wobei die meisten Konzepte auch auf die allgemeine Mediennutzung übertragbar sind. Im Folgenden wird ein Framework für die Unterstützung der wichtigsten Konzepte der Nutzerzentrierung im Multimedia Bereich vorgestellt. Um dem Trend zur mobilen Mediennutzung Sorge zu tragen, ermöglicht das vorgestellte Framework die Nutzung von multimedialen Diensten und Inhalten auf und über die Grenzen verschiedener Geräte und Netzwerke hinweg (Session mobility). Durch die Nutzung einer mobilen Agentenplattform in Kombination mit dem MPEG-21 Standard konnte ein neuer und flexibel erweiterbarer Ansatz zur Mobilität von Benutzungssitzungen realisiert werden. Im Zusammenhang mit der stetig wachsenden Menge an Inhalten und Diensten stellt diese Arbeit ein Konzept zur einfachen und individualisierten Selektion und dem Auffinden von interessanten Inhalten und Diensten in einer kontextspezifischen Weise vor. Hierbei werden Konzepte und Methoden des inhaltsbasierten Filterns, aktuelle Klassifikationsmechanismen und Methoden aus dem Bereich des ”Textminings” in neuer Art und Weise in einem Multimedia Empfehlungssystem eingesetzt. Zusätzlich sind Methoden des Web 2.0 in eine als Tag-basierte kollaborative Komponente integriert. In einer umfassenden Evaluation wurde sowohl die Umsetzbarkeit als auch der Mehrwert dieser Komponente demonstriert. Eine aktivere Beteiligung im Medienkonsum ermöglicht unsere iTV Komponente. Sie unterstützt das Anbieten und die Nutzung von interaktiven Diensten, begleitend zum Medienkonsum, auf mobilen Geräten. Basierend auf einem Szenario zur Anreicherung von TV Sendungen um interaktive Dienste konnte die Umsetzbarkeit dieses Konzepts demonstriert werden

Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system

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

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation Proceedings

We sought with this workshop, to foster a discussion of various topics that fall under the general umbrella of responsible recommendation: ethical considerations in recommendation, bias and discrimination in recommender systems, transparency and accountability, social impact of recommenders, user privacy, and other related concerns. Our goal was to encourage the community to think about how we build and study recommender systems in a socially-responsible manner. Recommendation systems are increasingly impacting people\u27s decisions in different walks of life including commerce, employment, dating, health, education and governance. As the impact and scope of recommendations increase, developing systems that tackle issues of fairness, transparency and accountability becomes important. This workshop was held in the spirit of FATML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning), DAT (Data and Algorithmic Transparency), and similar workshops in related communities. With Responsible Recommendation , we brought that conversation to RecSys

Contributions to security and privacy protection in recommendation systems

A recommender system is an automatic system that, given a customer model and a set of available documents, is able to select and offer those documents that are more interesting to the customer. From the point of view of security, there are two main issues that recommender systems must face: protection of the users' privacy and protection of other participants of the recommendation process. Recommenders issue personalized recommendations taking into account not only the profile of the documents, but also the private information that customers send to the recommender. Hence, the users' profiles include personal and highly sensitive information, such as their likes and dislikes. In order to have a really useful recommender system and improve its efficiency, we believe that users shouldn't be afraid of stating their preferences. The second challenge from the point of view of security involves the protection against a new kind of attack. Copyright holders have shifted their targets to attack the document providers and any other participant that aids in the process of distributing documents, even unknowingly. In addition, new legislation trends such as ACTA or the ¿Sinde-Wert law¿ in Spain show the interest of states all over the world to control and prosecute these intermediate nodes. we proposed the next contributions: 1.A social model that captures user's interests into the users' profiles, and a metric function that calculates the similarity between users, queries and documents. This model represents profiles as vectors of a social space. Document profiles are created by means of the inspection of the contents of the document. Then, user profiles are calculated as an aggregation of the profiles of the documents that the user owns. Finally, queries are a constrained view of a user profile. This way, all profiles are contained in the same social space, and the similarity metric can be used on any pair of them. 2.Two mechanisms to protect the personal information that the user profiles contain. The first mechanism takes advantage of the Johnson-Lindestrauss and Undecomposability of random matrices theorems to project profiles into social spaces of less dimensions. Even if the information about the user is reduced in the projected social space, under certain circumstances the distances between the original profiles are maintained. The second approach uses a zero-knowledge protocol to answer the question of whether or not two profiles are affine without leaking any information in case of that they are not. 3.A distributed system on a cloud that protects merchants, customers and indexers against legal attacks, by means of providing plausible deniability and oblivious routing to all the participants of the system. We use the term DocCloud to refer to this system. DocCloud organizes databases in a tree-shape structure over a cloud system and provide a Private Information Retrieval protocol to avoid that any participant or observer of the process can identify the recommender. This way, customers, intermediate nodes and even databases are not aware of the specific database that answered the query. 4.A social, P2P network where users link together according to their similarity, and provide recommendations to other users in their neighborhood. We defined an epidemic protocol were links are established based on the neighbors similarity, clustering and randomness. Additionally, we proposed some mechanisms such as the use SoftDHT to aid in the identification of affine users, and speed up the process of creation of clusters of similar users. 5.A document distribution system that provides the recommended documents at the end of the process. In our view of a recommender system, the recommendation is a complete process that ends when the customer receives the recommended document. We proposed SCFS, a distributed and secure filesystem where merchants, documents and users are protectedEste documento explora c omo localizar documentos interesantes para el usuario en grandes redes distribuidas mediante el uso de sistemas de recomendaci on. Se de fine un sistema de recomendaci on como un sistema autom atico que, dado un modelo de cliente y un conjunto de documentos disponibles, es capaz de seleccionar y ofrecer los documentos que son m as interesantes para el cliente. Las caracter sticas deseables de un sistema de recomendaci on son: (i) ser r apido, (ii) distribuido y (iii) seguro. Un sistema de recomendaci on r apido mejora la experiencia de compra del cliente, ya que una recomendaci on no es util si es que llega demasiado tarde. Un sistema de recomendaci on distribuido evita la creaci on de bases de datos centralizadas con informaci on sensible y mejora la disponibilidad de los documentos. Por ultimo, un sistema de recomendaci on seguro protege a todos los participantes del sistema: usuarios, proveedores de contenido, recomendadores y nodos intermedios. Desde el punto de vista de la seguridad, existen dos problemas principales a los que se deben enfrentar los sistemas de recomendaci on: (i) la protecci on de la intimidad de los usuarios y (ii) la protecci on de los dem as participantes del proceso de recomendaci on. Los recomendadores son capaces de emitir recomendaciones personalizadas teniendo en cuenta no s olo el per l de los documentos, sino tambi en a la informaci on privada que los clientes env an al recomendador. Por tanto, los per les de usuario incluyen informaci on personal y altamente sensible, como sus gustos y fobias. Con el n de desarrollar un sistema de recomendaci on util y mejorar su e cacia, creemos que los usuarios no deben tener miedo a la hora de expresar sus preferencias. Para ello, la informaci on personal que est a incluida en los per les de usuario debe ser protegida y la privacidad del usuario garantizada. El segundo desafi o desde el punto de vista de la seguridad implica un nuevo tipo de ataque. Dado que la prevenci on de la distribuci on ilegal de documentos con derechos de autor por medio de soluciones t ecnicas no ha sido efi caz, los titulares de derechos de autor cambiaron sus objetivos para atacar a los proveedores de documentos y cualquier otro participante que ayude en el proceso de distribuci on de documentos. Adem as, tratados y leyes como ACTA, la ley SOPA de EEUU o la ley "Sinde-Wert" en España ponen de manfi esto el inter es de los estados de todo el mundo para controlar y procesar a estos nodos intermedios. Los juicios recientes como MegaUpload, PirateBay o el caso contra el Sr. Pablo Soto en España muestran que estas amenazas son una realidad