CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version

The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action). This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events. The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search. A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Broadband for culture, a culture for broadband?

The augmentation of cultural participation in Flanders is one of the major cornerstones of the current cultural policy. Digital technologies offer a wide range of opportunities to achieve this goal, as the internet is often seen as a way to augment the number of visitors for arts centres. However, the availability of digital information technologies and the willingness to adopt these new ways of processing cultural material, is a prerequisite for this (r)evolution. This article is based on data collected in three surveys, one for each of the cultural actors; cultural organisations such as museums, arts centres etc, individual artists and art lovers in Flanders. Despite that most artists and cultural organizations are sufficiently equipped with up-to-date technological infrastructure, most websites lack true interactivity with a strong one-to-one relationship between audience, artists and cultural institutions. We therefore conclude that, although there are plenty of broadband connections and other digital tools available to the Flemish art scene, artists and cultural organisations lack a mind-set (or culture) to truly embrace and benefit from the potential of the current digital technologies

Hybrid Broadcast/Broadband TV Services and Media Synchronization. Demands, Preferences and Expectations of Spanish Consumers

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] The combination of broadcast and broadband ( hybrid) technologies for delivering TV related media contents is already a reality. It has been motivated by the large amount and diversity of media contents, together with the ubiquity and multiple connectivity capabilities of modern consumption devices. The use of connected TVs and companion devices (e.g., tablets, smartphones etc.) is gaining momentum. It enables personalized and enriched TV media experiences, by also exploiting social communication opportunities. Likewise, the media consumption paradigm is worldwide evolving from passive and isolated consumer experiences toward interactive and group shared experiences between remote consumers. Nevertheless, despite the specification of standards, such as hybrid broadcast broadband TV, and the efforts from operators and content providers in the last years, the adoption of hybrid TV media services in Europe is still not as high as expected. This paper presents the concept and some examples of hybrid TV media services, emphasizing the importance of including a combination of media synchronization solutions, known as hybrid sync, to guarantee a satisfactory level of quality of experience. Additionally, it includes the summary and discussion of the results of a research study focused on more than 1000 Spanish users' habits, preferences, and expectations regarding four representative hybrid TV media services. Many valuable insights and conclusions have been derived. For instance, the current low market adoption of hybrid TV media services, despite their advantages and the high interest of consumers, and that key technological challenges still need to be overcome. The obtained results and impressions foresee the impact (or potential) of such services in the upcoming TV related media consumption landscape. Therefore, devising proper standard-compliant technological solutions (paying special attention to hybrid sync) and equipment should be continued producing appropriate contents, deploying proper hybrid TV media services and applications. As well, it should be convenient to undertake marketing and commercial efforts to boost their deployment. The contributions of this paper can be very valuable to the interested agents to be aware of the remaining challenges, envisage the opportunities, and drive their efforts to maximize the market adoption of such services.This work was supported in part by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Its R&D&I Support Program under Project TEC2013-45492-R.Boronat, F.; Montagud, M.; Marfil-Reguero, D.; Luzón, C. (2018). Hybrid Broadcast/Broadband TV Services and Media Synchronization. Demands, Preferences and Expectations of Spanish Consumers. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 64(1):52-69. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBC.2017.2737819S526964

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

Automatic news recommendations via aggregated profiling

Today, people have only limited, valuable leisure time at their hands which they want to fill in as good as possible according to their own interests, whereas broadcasters want to produce and distribute news items as fast and targeted as possible. These (developing) news stories can be characterised as dynamic, chained, and distributed events in addition to which it is important to aggregate, link, enrich, recommend, and distribute these news event items as targeted as possible to the individual, interested user. In this paper, we show how personalised recommendation and distribution of news events, described using an RDF/OWL representation of the NewsML-G2 standard, can be enabled by automatically categorising and enriching news events metadata via smart indexing and linked open datasets available on the web of data. The recommendations-based on a global, aggregated profile, which also takes into account the (dis)likings of peer friends-are finally fed to the user via a personalised RSS feed. As such, the ultimate goal is to provide an open, user-friendly recommendation platform that harnesses the end-user with a tool to access useful news event information that goes beyond basic information retrieval. At the same time, we provide the (inter)national community with standardised mechanisms to describe/distribute news event and profile information

Crowdsourcing Linked Data on listening experiences through reuse and enhancement of library data

Research has approached the practice of musical reception in a multitude of ways, such as the analysis of professional critique, sales figures and psychological processes activated by the act of listening. Studies in the Humanities, on the other hand, have been hindered by the lack of structured evidence of actual experiences of listening as reported by the listeners themselves, a concern that was voiced since the early Web era. It was however assumed that such evidence existed, albeit in pure textual form, but could not be leveraged until it was digitised and aggregated. The Listening Experience Database (LED) responds to this research need by providing a centralised hub for evidence of listening in the literature. Not only does LED support search and reuse across nearly 10,000 records, but it also provides machine-readable structured data of the knowledge around the contexts of listening. To take advantage of the mass of formal knowledge that already exists on the Web concerning these contexts, the entire framework adopts Linked Data principles and technologies. This also allows LED to directly reuse open data from the British Library for the source documentation that is already published. Reused data are re-published as open data with enhancements obtained by expanding over the model of the original data, such as the partitioning of published books and collections into individual stand-alone documents. The database was populated through crowdsourcing and seamlessly incorporates data reuse from the very early data entry phases. As the sources of the evidence often contain vague, fragmentary of uncertain information, facilities were put in place to generate structured data out of such fuzziness. Alongside elaborating on these functionalities, this article provides insights into the most recent features of the latest instalment of the dataset and portal, such as the interlinking with the MusicBrainz database, the relaxation of geographical input constraints through text mining, and the plotting of key locations in an interactive geographical browser

The future of technology enhanced active learning – a roadmap

The notion of active learning refers to the active involvement of learner in the learning process, capturing ideas of learning-by-doing and the fact that active participation and knowledge construction leads to deeper and more sustained learning. Interactivity, in particular learnercontent interaction, is a central aspect of technology-enhanced active learning. In this roadmap, the pedagogical background is discussed, the essential dimensions of technology-enhanced active learning systems are outlined and the factors that are expected to influence these systems currently and in the future are identified. A central aim is to address this promising field from a best practices perspective, clarifying central issues and formulating an agenda for future developments in the form of a roadmap

Legal Issues Concerning P2P Exchange of Educational Materials and Their Impact on E-Learning Multi-Agent Systems

The last years have known an impressive change in the use of technologies for the sharing and dissemination of knowledge, thus affecting deeply all the traditional means used by education in all its shapes and levels. This transformation has not been fully understood by the society at large for its immense impacts and its short life. This paper describes in the question emerging from the clash of the rights to education in a wide sense and the rights derived from authorship and how that issue is affecting the design of e-learning multi-agent tools