Principles of Multimedia News Systems for Business Applications

In the past few years considerable demand for business oriented multimedia information systems has developed. A multimedia information system is one that can create, import, integrate, store, retrieve, edit, and delete two or more types of media materials in digital form, such as audio, image, full-motion video, and text information. Multimedia information systems play a central role in many business activities. They represent a very special class complex computing systems. This paper surveys a special type of multimedia information systems: multimedia news systems. Multimedia news systems deal with architectures to manage complex multimedia news databases, online presentation and distribution services or the integration of several existing services to meta-services using intelligent news retrieval engines. The leading presentation platform in multimedia news presentation is news networks providing television services and Internet content distribution. The primary focus is on advanced multimedia news systems infrastructure, document standards, application architecture and principles for multimedia news on the Web that suggest long-term trends in this increasingly important area.multimedia, information systems, business applications

Interactive Video Search

With an increasing amount of video data in our daily life, the need for content-based search in videos increases as well. Though a lot of research has been spent on video retrieval tools and methods which allow for automatic search in videos through content-based queries, still the performance of automatic video retrieval is far from optimal. In this tutorial we discussed (i) proposed solutions for improved video content navigation, (ii) typical interaction of content-based querying features, and (iii) advanced video content visualization methods. Moreover, we discussed interactive video search systems and ways to evaluate their performance

Virtual reality and its role in removing the barriers that turn cognitive impairments into intellectual disability

Early expectations of the contribution that virtual reality (VR) could make to education far exceeded actual applications. This was largely due to the initial immaturity of the technology and a lack of evidence base on which to base design and utilisation. While the early developments in computer based learning largely concentrated on mainstream education, leaving those with special needs behind, the potential of VR as an educational tool was exploited for those with intellectual disabilities right from the start. This paper describes the empirical evidence that has contributed to the development of educational virtual reality for those with intellectual disabilities: studies on transfer of learning from the virtual to the real world; how teachers might support those using VR; the design of virtual environments and what input/control devices best facilitate use of desktop VR. Future developments and ethical issues are also considered

Indexing, browsing and searching of digital video

Video is a communications medium that normally brings together moving pictures with a synchronised audio track into a discrete piece or pieces of information. The size of a “piece ” of video can variously be referred to as a frame, a shot, a scene, a clip, a programme or an episode, and these are distinguished by their lengths and by their composition. We shall return to the definition of each of these in section 4 this chapter. In modern society, video is ver

Adaptive hypermedia for education and training

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) is an alternative to the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach in the development of hypermedia systems. AH systems build a model of the goals, preferences, and knowledge of each individual user; this model is used throughout the interaction with the user to adapt to the needs of that particular user (Brusilovsky, 1996b). For example, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia system will be given a presentation that is adapted specifically to his or her knowledge of the subject (De Bra & Calvi, 1998; Hothi, Hall, & Sly, 2000) as well as a suggested set of the most relevant links to proceed further (Brusilovsky, Eklund, & Schwarz, 1998; Kavcic, 2004). An adaptive electronic encyclopedia will personalize the content of an article to augment the user's existing knowledge and interests (Bontcheva & Wilks, 2005; Milosavljevic, 1997). A museum guide will adapt the presentation about every visited object to the user's individual path through the museum (Oberlander et al., 1998; Stock et al., 2007). Adaptive hypermedia belongs to the class of user-adaptive systems (Schneider-Hufschmidt, Kühme, & Malinowski, 1993). A distinctive feature of an adaptive system is an explicit user model that represents user knowledge, goals, and interests, as well as other features that enable the system to adapt to different users with their own specific set of goals. An adaptive system collects data for the user model from various sources that can include implicitly observing user interaction and explicitly requesting direct input from the user. The user model is applied to provide an adaptation effect, that is, tailor interaction to different users in the same context. In different kinds of adaptive systems, adaptation effects could vary greatly. In AH systems, it is limited to three major adaptation technologies: adaptive content selection, adaptive navigation support, and adaptive presentation. The first of these three technologies comes from the fields of adaptive information retrieval (IR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). When the user searches for information, the system adaptively selects and prioritizes the most relevant items (Brajnik, Guida, & Tasso, 1987; Brusilovsky, 1992b)