Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

The Big Match - Lexis v Westlaw

Lexis and Westlaw are the biggest names in subscription legal database provision. The author provides a comparative critical examination from his experience is of academic subscriptions to the services - including their American academic contentPreprint of an article by Paul Norman, former Reference and Online Services Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, published in Legal Information Management, the journal of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarian

Using the Annotated Bibliography as a Resource for Indicative Summarization

We report on a language resource consisting of 2000 annotated bibliography entries, which is being analyzed as part of our research on indicative document summarization. We show how annotated bibliographies cover certain aspects of summarization that have not been well-covered by other summary corpora, and motivate why they constitute an important form to study for information retrieval. We detail our methodology for collecting the corpus, and overview our document feature markup that we introduced to facilitate summary analysis. We present the characteristics of the corpus, methods of collection, and show its use in finding the distribution of types of information included in indicative summaries and their relative ordering within the summaries.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

A report on the ULTRLAB's development of online components in NCSL programmes

This report is one of two produced by ULTRALAB forthe National College of School Leadership (NCSL). Here we discuss the research and development of online components of two NCSL programmes. The other report looks at the Talking Heads project, an online community for Headteachers in England. This report considers our work on two NCSL programmes. The new model National Qualification for Headship (NPQH) had its first cohort of learners in March 2001. ULTRALAB was involved in consultancy with the DfES, the writers of the programme materials and the ten regional training providers, in setting up the online elements from September 2000. The online community aspects of NPQH were established using think.com software, with the name Virtual Heads chosen for the overarching national community. The pilot for the Certificate of School Business Management started in February 2002. Our involvement here was to develop the online community and support the tutors in its use.The online community aspects were established using think.com software, with the name Bursars’ Count chosen for the overarching national community

Astrobites as a Community-led Model for Education, Science Communication, and Accessibility in Astrophysics

Support for early career astronomers who are just beginning to explore astronomy research is imperative to increase retention of diverse practitioners in the field. Since 2010, Astrobites has played an instrumental role in engaging members of the community -- particularly undergraduate and graduate students -- in research. In this white paper, the Astrobites collaboration outlines our multi-faceted online education platform that both eases the transition into astronomy research and promotes inclusive professional development opportunities. We additionally offer recommendations for how the astronomy community can reduce barriers to entry to astronomy research in the coming decade

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

KC-Viz: a novel approach to visualizing and nNavigating ontologies

There is empirical evidence that the user interaction metaphors used in ontology engineering toolkits are largely inadequate and that novel interactive frameworks for human ontology interaction are needed. Here we present a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, called KC Viz, which exploits an innovative ontology summarization method to support a ’middleout ontology browsing’ approach, where it becomes possible to navigate ontologies starting from the most information-rich nodes (i.e., key concepts). This approach is similar to map-based visualization and navigation in Geographical Information Systems, where, e.g., major cities are displayed more prominently than others, depending on the current level of granularity

Developing the Guided Learner Journey

The University of Hertfordshire was one of the first UK universities to embrace the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and embed it as part of our learning strategy to personalise and enhance the student experience. Our in-house built platform, Studynet, which has been in continuous use and ongoing development since 2001, has facilitated a continuum of student engagement from blended approaches to studying via online or distance learning modes. In 2014 we embarked on a two year, in-depth consultation process with students and staff to identify the vision for our future online environment. Through the process we co-developed a set of pedagogic principles and aspirations for our new VLE which resulted in our vision of a ‘Guided Learner Journey’ (GLJ). To enable our vision we purchased Canvas (a virtual learning environment) and Talis (a reading management software) and through our close working relationship, and the innovative approach of Canvas, we have embedded the softwares within Studynet to enable the implementation of the GLJ. In our presentation we will share our consultation and prototyping process as well as well as training programme we have developed to ensure the smooth implementation of our vision.Non peer reviewe

Can Automatic Abstracting Improve on Current Extracting Techniques in Aiding Users to Judge the Relevance of Pages in Search Engine Results?

Current search engines use sentence extraction techniques to produce snippet result summaries, which users may find less than ideal for determining the relevance of pages. Unlike extracting, abstracting programs analyse the context of documents and rewrite them into informative summaries. Our project aims to produce abstracting summaries which are coherent and easy to read thereby lessening users’ time in judging the relevance of pages. However, automatic abstracting technique has its domain restriction. For solving this problem we propose to employ text classification techniques. We propose a new approach to initially classify whole web documents into sixteen top level ODP categories by using machine learning and a Bayesian classifier. We then manually create sixteen templates for each category. The summarisation techniques we use include a natural language processing techniques to weight words and analyse lexical chains to identify salient phrases and place them into relevant template slots to produce summaries

The Físchlár-News-Stories system: personalised access to an archive of TV news

The “Físchlár” systems are a family of tools for capturing, analysis, indexing, browsing, searching and summarisation of digital video information. Físchlár-News-Stories, described in this paper, is one of those systems, and provides access to a growing archive of broadcast TV news. Físchlár-News-Stories has several notable features including the fact that it automatically records TV news and segments a broadcast news program into stories, eliminating advertisements and credits at the start/end of the broadcast. Físchlár-News-Stories supports access to individual stories via calendar lookup, text search through closed captions, automatically-generated links between related stories, and personalised access using a personalisation and recommender system based on collaborative filtering. Access to individual news stories is supported either by browsing keyframes with synchronised closed captions, or by playback of the recorded video. One strength of the Físchlár-News-Stories system is that it is actually used, in practice, daily, to access news. Several aspects of the Físchlár systems have been published before, bit in this paper we give a summary of the Físchlár-News-Stories system in operation by following a scenario in which it is used and also outlining how the underlying system realises the functions it offers