Interactive Digital Television and Electronic Public Services: Emergent Issues

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been at the heart of a transformation of public services in the UK, in a process that has seen the emergence of forms of 'electronic public services' (EPS). Policy makers have hoped that EPS will bring about improved, convenient, accessible and cheaper public services. The Internet has been at the heart of attempts to deliver EPS. However, limiting factors affecting user uptake of web-based services, including skills and access issues, have encouraged service providers to consider additional delivery platforms. Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) has emerged as one possible platform, since it brings an interactive capacity to a medium that is both familiar and easy to use. This paper examines the ways in which the capabilities offered by iDTV technology have been exploited by policy makers and service providers. Reporting data from a number of research projects, this paper also explores the extent to which the technology has supported the emergence of high-quality and user-friendly services, and the extent to which users have valued and utilised such services. It concludes that while we now have a significant evidence base of provider and user experiences, the relative immaturity of the technology and the nature of the iDTV initiatives themselves has prevented a full investigation of EPS via iDTV

Affective computing in a T-Learning application

This paper presents T-EDUCO, the first t-learning affective aware tutoring tool. T-EDUCO goes further than simply broadcasting an interactive educational application by allowing the figure of a tutor to be present and to govern the students’ learning process. The tutor can access academic and emotional information about the students through a continuous “emotional path” that includes timestamps and information about the progress made in each exercise. In this way, personal messages or extra educational contents for improving learning can be sent to the students. All this is made possible by a combination of broadcast and broadband technologiesFacultad de Informátic

Interactive digital television and electronic public services: emergent issues

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been at the heart of a transformation of public services in the UK, in a process that has seen the emergence of forms of ‘electronic public services’ (EPS). Policy makers have hoped that EPS will bring about improved, convenient, accessible and cheaper public services. The Internet has been at the heart of attempts to deliver EPS. However, limiting factors affecting user uptake of web-based services, including skills and access issues, have encouraged service providers to consider additional delivery platforms. Interactive Digital Television (iDTV) has emerged as one possible platform, since it brings an interactive capacity to a medium that is both familiar and easy to use. This paper examines the ways in which the capabilities offered by iDTV technology have been exploited by policy makers and service providers. Reporting data from a number of research projects, this paper also explores the extent to which the technology has supported the emergence of high-quality and user-friendly services, and the extent to which users have valued and utilised such services. It concludes that while we now have a significant evidence base of provider and user experiences, the relative immaturity of the technology and the nature of the iDTV initiatives themselves has prevented a full investigation of EPS via iDTV

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

A Technological Framework for the Authoring and Presentation of T-learning Courses

Broadcasting interactive learning applications through the digital TV promises to open new pedagogical perspectives, also in a life-long learning perspective, given the wide penetration of the medium. This article proposes an open flexible and composable framework for the development, the delivery and the presentation of t-learning courses in interactive digital TV (iDTV). The framework is divided into two main parts: the production side, where the course is prepared and the client side, where it is presented on iDTV, and where the user can perform the educational interaction. The course production is supported by an ad-hoc designed authoring tool, while the runtime user interaction on iDTV is managed by a multimedia course player providing personalization services and a library of educational and entertainment elements and services. Seven experimental t-learning courses were created by pedagogical experts in several knowledge domains and served as an important test and evaluation bench for the framework, in view of the upcoming extensive end-user testing

Diseño y evaluación de usabilidad de una interface multi-entradas en el contexto de la IDTV

En los últimos años y considerando el auge de la televisión digital interactiva (idTV), ha habido un gran interés en el diseño de aplicaciones y servicios para esta plataforma -- El éxito de estas aplicaciones, en gran parte, depende de la facilidad de uso y de la forma en que los usuarios interactúan con éstas -- Por tal razón, se han explorado diferentes interfaces y modos de interacción que permitan mejorar la experiencia del usuario con estas aplicaciones -- En este artículo se plantea una interacción con aplicaciones de idTV utilizando tecnologías emergentes de hardware y software -- Como instrumento para lograr esto, se propone una interface de control multi-entradas, usando diferentes modos de interacción como: botones táctiles, reconocimiento de gestos, reconocimiento de voz y reconocimiento de movimientos -- Estos modos de interacción fueron validados a través de pruebas de usabilidad aplicando un modelo de evaluación quasi-experimental de tres dimensiones, en el que cada dimensión representa respectivamente a: los usuarios, las tareas y las interfaces de control -- Con estas valoraciones cualitativas y cuantitativas se realizó un análisis de las posibles mejoras en la usabilidad de una aplicación determinada de idTV -- Los resultados mostraron pocas diferencias con respecto a la interface de control tradicional para tareas en las cuales el usuario estaba familiarizado, sin embargo, sí se encontraron diferencias significativas en la realización de tareas que involucraban una mayor interacción del usuario, como es el caso de la introducción de texto o la navegación entre menú

Web Content Search and Adaptation for IDTV: One Step Forward in the Mediamorphosis Process toward Personal-TV

We are on the threshold of a mediamorphosis that will revolutionize the way we interact with our TV sets. The combination between interactive digital TV (IDTV) and the Web fosters the development of new interactive multimedia services enjoyable even through a TV screen and a remote control. Yet, several design constraints complicate the deployment of this new pattern of services. Prominent unresolved issues involve macro-problems such as collecting information on the Web based on users' preferences and appropriately presenting retrieved Web contents on the TV screen. To this aim, we propose a system able to dynamically convey contents from the Web to IDTV systems. Our system presents solutions both for personalized Web content search and automatic TV-format adaptation of retrieved documents. As we demonstrate through two case study applications, our system merges the best of IDTV and Web domains spinning the TV mediamorphosis toward the creation of the personal-TV concept

Extending the Bayesian classifier to a context-aware recommender system for mobile devices

Mobile devices that are capable of playing Internet videos have become wide-spread in recent years. Because of the enormous offer of video content, the lack of sufficient presentation space on the screen, and the laborious navigation on mobile devices, the video consumption process becomes more complicated for the end-user. To handle this problem, people need new instruments to assist with the hunting, filtering and selection process. We developed a methodology for mobile devices that makes the huge content sources more manageable by creating a user profile and personalizing the offer. This paper reports the structure of the user profile, the user interaction mechanism, and the recommendation algorithm, an improved version of the Bayesian classifier that incorporates aspects of the consumption context (like time, location, and mood of the user) to make the suggestions more accurate