Eolas: video retrieval application for helping tourists

In this paper, a video retrieval application for the Android mobile platform is described. The application utilises computer vision technologies that, given a photo of a landmark of interest, will automatically locate online videos about that landmark. Content-based video retrieval technologies are adopted to find the most relevant videos based on visual similarity of video content. The system has been evaluated us- ing a custom test collection with human annotated ground truth. We show that our system is effective, both in terms of speed and accuracy. This application is proposed for demonstration at MMM2014 and we are sure that this application would benefit tourists either planning travel or while travelling in real-time

Proxy-based Mobile Computing Infrastructure

In recent years, there has been a huge growth in mobile applications. More mobile users are able to access Internet services via their mobile devices e.g., smartphones ans tablets. Some of these applications are highly interactive and resource intensive. Mobile applications, with limited storage capacity, slow processors and limited battery life, could be connected to the remote servers in clouds for leveraging resources. For example, weather applications use a remote service that collects weather data and make this data available through a well-defined API. This represents a static partitioning of functionality between mobile devices and a remote server that is determined at run-time. Regardless of the network distance between the cloud infrastructure and the mobile device, the use of a remote service is well suited for mobile device applications with relatively little data to be transferred. However, long distances between a mobile device and remote services makes this approach unsuitable for applications that require larger amounts of data to be transferred and/or have a high level of interactiveness with the user. This includes mobile video communications (e.g., Skype, Face-Time, Google-Hangout), gaming applications that require sophisticated rendering and cloud media analysis that can be used to offer more personalized services. The latency incurred with this architecture makes it difficult to support real-time and interactive applications. A related problem is that the static partitioning strategy is not always suitable for all network conditions and inputs. For example, let us consider a speech recognition application. The performance depends on the size of the input and the type of connectivity to the backbone. Another challenge is that the communication medium between the mobile application and the remote service includes wireless links. Wireless links are more error prone and have less bandwidth than wired links. Often a mobile application may be disconnected. One approach to addressing these challenges is the use of a proxy. A proxy is computing power that is located at the network edge. This allows it to address problems with latency. It is possible for a proxy to have services that allow for offloading tasks from either the cloud or the mobile device and to deal with communication challenges between the mobile application and the mobile device. This work proposes a proxy-based system that acts as a middleware between the mobile application and the remote service. The proposed middleware consists of a set of proxies that provide services. The proposed middleware includes services for proxy discovery and selection, mechanisms for dealing with balancing loads on proxies and handoff. A prototype was developed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed proxy-based system

Software Takes Command

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Software has replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before 21st century to create, store, distribute and interact with cultural artifacts. It has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination - a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st century. Offering the the first theoretical and historical account of software for media authoring and its effects on the practice and the very concept of 'media,' the author of The Language of New Media (2001) develops his own theory for this rapidly-growing, always-changing field. What was the thinking and motivations of people who in the 1960 and 1970s created concepts and practical techniques that underlie contemporary media software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, Final Cut and After Effects? How do their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a 'medium' after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Lev Manovich answers these questions and supports his theoretical arguments by detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and the projects in motion graphics, interactive environments, graphic design and architecture. Software Takes Command is a must for all practicing designers and media artists and scholars concerned with contemporary media

Macro-level Factors Impacting Colorectal Cancer Screening Behavior Among Church-going Chinese Immigrants in the U.S.: A Convergent Mixed-method Study

Chinese immigrants (CIs) had low colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rates. Macro-level health determinants may affect CIs\u27 CRC screening; however, this is not well established. Thus, this research looked at the macro-level social factors of CRC screening among CIs. The POET theoretical framework guided this study, which includes four components: population (P), organization (O), environment (E), and technology (T). A convergent mixed method was used to investigate whether sociodemographic, acculturation, religious social capital, and mobile media-based cancer information seeking may predict CIs\u27 endoscopic screening, and how these variables impact it. A validated survey and an interview covering the same factors were utilized to collect quantitative and qualitative data from three local Chinese American churches. 101 church-going CIs completed questionnaires and 29 were interviewed. The three macro-level determinants of screening behavior were modeled using logistic regression. The interview data were analyzed using a framework analysis, which included familiarizing with the data, establishing a coding framework, coding, organizing categories and quotes, and mapping and interpretation. The majority of participants were over 50, employed, married, insured, well educated, and earning over $50,000/year. 54.46% of participants had Endoscopic screening. Doctor recommendation, higher Sunday worship attendance, and mobile media-based cancer information seeking were all significantly associated with endoscopic screening (p \u3c .05). The qualitative investigation showed that a doctor\u27s recommendation was essential. Mobile media eases endoscopic screening fear and empowers participants. The endoscopic screening was less impacted by high religious social capital among churchgoers. The findings show that improving endoscopic screening among CIs requires multilevel interventions. Doctors should provide culturally and linguistically appropriate screening recommendations. Chinese American churches may help by sharing endoscopic screening information and emotional support. Mobile media should be used to raise CI screening awareness and ease screening fears

Software Takes Command

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Software has replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before 21st century to create, store, distribute and interact with cultural artifacts. It has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination - a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st century. Offering the the first theoretical and historical account of software for media authoring and its effects on the practice and the very concept of 'media,' the author of The Language of New Media (2001) develops his own theory for this rapidly-growing, always-changing field. What was the thinking and motivations of people who in the 1960 and 1970s created concepts and practical techniques that underlie contemporary media software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, Final Cut and After Effects? How do their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a 'medium' after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Lev Manovich answers these questions and supports his theoretical arguments by detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and the projects in motion graphics, interactive environments, graphic design and architecture. Software Takes Command is a must for all practicing designers and media artists and scholars concerned with contemporary media

Mobile media search engine

This Final Year Project report describes the analysis, theoretical review and implementation of an image near duplicate detection search engine. It also explores the feasibility of improving image annotation result to enable more precise media search engine using time information from images. Image near duplicate detection has been an increasingly interesting research field due to rapid growth in personal image collection of mobile device users. It has a high potential in helping users to annotate image by retrieving near duplicate images as well as retrieving similar images to build albums. It also allows users to search for visually similar images using image-based search. The near duplicate image detection part of project was based on extracting features using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and feature matching method to retrieve near duplicate images. The proposed method has shown commendable result on the system with high precision versus recall based on our image database compared with other methods. A more detailed review on the database used, chosen method and other available methods is discussed.Bachelor of Engineerin

Interactive mobile media search engine

The proliferation of mobile devices with high-resolution built-in camera has led to a new form of information searching: the input of search engine is no longer restricted to text only, but extended into the form of image and voice as well. In particular, mobile visual search has been widely studied by researchers to develop the new kind of search engine that is adaptable to image-based input. Different approaches have been proposed to optimize the process of feature matching and geometric verification (GV) of images so that the retrieval result is accurate and efficient. The objective of this thesis is to optimize the performance of mobile visual search system in terms of classification accuracy and time performance. The goal was achieved through analyzing the problem of the current GV, as well as, investigating the parameters or thresholds used in pairwise matching and RANSAC estimation algorithm. Different variations of robust estimation of geometric transformation were also explored as the possible alternatives other than RANSAC, such as PROSAC, MLESAC and SCRAMSAC. We have addressed the problem in the implementation of mobile visual search as well as the necessity to speed up the process of GV while maintaining a considerable improvement on the classification accuracy.Bachelor of Engineerin

Interactive mobile media search engine

This final year project aims to learn and explore the visual searching system, which has been gaining popularity in recent years. A broad theoretical background has been studied and various factors that affect the system performance have been examined. In addition, a small database for bag recognition has been constructed for case study purpose.Bachelor of Engineerin

Database application for mobile media search

In modern business computing, data frequently resides on multiple sites within an organization, to be managed by several Database Management Systems (DBMS). The advantages in organizing these remote databases to appear as a single logical are better reliability, expandability, availability and management than a centralized database. The data are logically related, but physically scattered across the computer network to achieve Replication Transparency, Location Transparency or a combination of both. However, the true benefit of Replication Transparency lies in data consistency among the replicated sites. In this project, the author had deployed ASP.NET Web Site for Full-Text search, driven by the back-end MySQL Server. The author exploits the engine-specific features of MySQL Server, mainly from FEDERATED and MyISAM storage engines, in the database distribution. The linked server feature of the FEDERATED storage engine was maximized in either fully replicating data from local to a remote server or accessing data from the remote server.Bachelor of Engineerin