CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Collaborative development of the Arrowsmith two node search interface designed for laboratory investigators.

Arrowsmith is a unique computer-assisted strategy designed to assist investigators in detecting biologically-relevant connections between two disparate sets of articles in Medline. This paper describes how an inter-institutional consortium of neuroscientists used the UIC Arrowsmith web interface http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu in their daily work and guided the development, refinement and expansion of the system into a suite of tools intended for use by the wider scientific community

Personalised online sales using web usage data mining

Practically every major company with a retail operation has its own web site and online sales facilities. This paper describes a toolset that exploits web usage data mining techniques to identify customer Internet browsing patterns. These patterns are then used to underpin a personalised product recommendation system for online sales. Within the architecture, a Kohonen neural network or self-organizing map (SOM) has been trained for use both offline, to discover user group profiles, and in real-time to examine active user click stream data, make a match to a specific user group, and recommend a unique set of product browsing options appropriate to an individual user. Our work demonstrates that this approach can overcome the scalability problem that is common among these types of system. Our results also show that a personalised recommender system powered by the SOM predictive model is able to produce consistent recommendations

e-Business challenges and directions: important themes from the first ICE-B workshop

A three-day asynchronous, interactive workshop was held at ICE-B’10 in Piraeus, Greece in July of 2010. This event captured conference themes for e-Business challenges and directions across four subject areas: a) e-Business applications and models, b) enterprise engineering, c) mobility, d) business collaboration and e-Services, and e) technology platforms. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods were used to gather, organize and evaluate themes and their ratings. This paper summarizes the most important themes rated by participants: a) Since technology is becoming more economic and social in nature, more agile and context-based application develop methods are needed. b) Enterprise engineering approaches are needed to support the design of systems that can evolve with changing stakeholder needs. c) The digital native groundswell requires changes to business models, operations, and systems to support Prosumers. d) Intelligence and interoperability are needed to address Prosumer activity and their highly customized product purchases. e) Technology platforms must rapidly and correctly adapt, provide widespread offerings and scale appropriately, in the context of changing situational contexts

Tagging amongst friends: an exploration of social media exchange on mobile devices

Mobile social software tools have great potential in transforming the way users communicate on the move, by augmenting their everyday environment with pertinent information from their online social networks. A fundamental aspect to the success of these tools is in developing an understanding of their emergent real-world use and also the aspirations of users; this thesis focuses on investigating one facet of this: the exchange of social media. To facilitate this investigation, three mobile social tools have been developed for use on locationaware smartphone handsets. The first is an exploratory social game, 'Gophers' that utilises task oriented gameplay, social agents and GSM cell positioning to create an engaging ecosystem in which users create and exchange geotagged social media. Supplementing this is a pair of social awareness and tagging services that integrate with a user's existing online social network; the 'ItchyFeet' service uses GPS positioning to allow the user and their social network peers to collaboratively build a landscape of socially important geotagged locations, which are used as indicators of a user's context on their Facebook profile; likewise 'MobiClouds' revisits this concept by exploring the novel concept of Bluetooth 'people tagging' to facilitate the creation of tags that are more indicative of users' social surroundings. The thesis reports on findings from formal trials of these technologies, using groups of volunteer social network users based around the city of Lincoln, UK, where the incorporation of daily diaries, interviews and automated logging precisely monitored application use. Through analysis of trial data, a guide for designers of future mobile social tools has been devised and the factors that typically influence users when creating tags are identified. The thesis makes a number of further contributions to the area. Firstly, it identifies the natural desire of users to update their status whilst mobile; a practice recently popularised by commercial 'check in' services. It also explores the overarching narratives that developed over time, which formed an integral part of the tagging process and augmented social media with a higher level meaning. Finally, it reveals how social media is affected by the tag positioning method selected and also by personal circumstances, such as the proximity of social peers

How sketches work: a cognitive theory for improved system design

Evidence is presented that in the early stages of design or composition the mental processes used by artists for visual invention require a different type of support from those used for visualising a nearly complete object. Most research into machine visualisation has as its goal the production of realistic images which simulate the light pattern presented to the retina by real objects. In contrast sketch attributes preserve the results of cognitive processing which can be used interactively to amplify visual thought. The traditional attributes of sketches include many types of indeterminacy which may reflect the artist's need to be "vague". Drawing on contemporary theories of visual cognition and neuroscience this study discusses in detail the evidence for the following functions which are better served by rough sketches than by the very realistic imagery favoured in machine visualising systems. 1. Sketches are intermediate representational types which facilitate the mental translation between descriptive and depictive modes of representing visual thought. 2. Sketch attributes exploit automatic processes of perceptual retrieval and object recognition to improve the availability of tacit knowledge for visual invention. 3. Sketches are percept-image hybrids. The incomplete physical attributes of sketches elicit and stabilise a stream of super-imposed mental images which amplify inventive thought. 4. By segregating and isolating meaningful components of visual experience, sketches may assist the user to attend selectively to a limited part of a visual task, freeing otherwise over-loaded cognitive resources for visual thought. 5. Sequences of sketches and sketching acts support the short term episodic memory for cognitive actions. This assists creativity, providing voluntary control over highly practised mental processes which can otherwise become stereotyped. An attempt is made to unite the five hypothetical functions. Drawing on the Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory, it is speculated that the five functions may be related to a limited capacity monitoring mechanism which makes tacit visual knowledge explicitly available for conscious control and manipulation. It is suggested that the resources available to the human brain for imagining nonexistent objects are a cultural adaptation of visual mechanisms which evolved in early hominids for responding to confusing or incomplete stimuli from immediately present objects and events. Sketches are cultural inventions which artificially mimic aspects of such stimuli in order to capture these shared resources for the different purpose of imagining objects which do not yet exist. Finally the implications of the theory for the design of improved machine systems is discussed. The untidy attributes of traditional sketches are revealed to include cultural inventions which serve subtle cognitive functions. However traditional media have many short-comings which it should be possible to correct with new technology. Existing machine systems for sketching tend to imitate nonselectively the media bound properties of sketches without regard to the functions they serve. This may prove to be a mistake. It is concluded that new system designs are needed in which meaningfully structured data and specialised imagery amplify without interference or replacement the impressive but limited creative resources of the visual brain

A Creative Cognition Framework for Generating Breakthrough Ideas

Latest developments in creative cognition, largely informed by neuroscience, give us the ability to debunk pervasive and insidious creativity myths that get in the way of creating breakthrough ideas. This paper, through a review of creative cognition and neuroscience literature derives and synthesises a creative cognition framework focused on engaging metacognition of the creative process, activating creating drive, shifting perspective to gain insight, deploying defocused attention and finally, and only when the other dimensions have been established, sparking remote connections and getting to breakthrough ideas. As practitioners we need to ensure we are strategically deploying this framework, creating the time and space for deep thinking, and that the process seamlessly supports people to be at their creative best. As thinking on creative cognition develops further over time, this framework will be updated and also iterated with practical learnings from deployment

An Investigation into Dynamic Web Service Composition Using a Simulation Framework

[Motivation] Web Services technology has emerged as a promising solution for creat- ing distributed systems with the potential to overcome the limitation of former distrib- uted system technologies. Web services provide a platform-independent framework that enables companies to run their business services over the internet. Therefore, many techniques and tools are being developed to create business to business/business to customer applications. In particular, researchers are exploring ways to build new services from existing services by dynamically composing services from a range of resources. [Aim] This thesis aims to identify the technologies and strategies cur- rently being explored for organising the dynamic composition of Web services, and to determine how extensively each of these has been demonstrated and assessed. In addition, the thesis will study the matchmaking and selection processes which are essential processes for Web service composition. [Research Method] We under- took a mapping study of empirical papers that had been published over the period 2000 to 2009. The aim of the mapping study was to identify the technologies and strategies currently being explored for organising the composition of Web services, and to determine how extensively each of these has been demonstrated and assessed. We then built a simulation framework to carry out some experiments on composition strategies. The rst experiment compared the results of a close replication of an ex- isting study with the original results in order to evaluate our close replication study. The simulation framework was then used to investigate the use of a QoS model for supporting the selection process, comparing this with the ranking technique in terms of their performance. [Results] The mapping study found 1172 papers that matched our search terms, from which 94 were classied as providing practical demonstration of ideas related to dynamic composition. We have analysed 68 of these in more detail. Only 29 provided a `formal' empirical evaluation. From these, we selected a `baseline' study to test our simulation model. Running the experiments using simulated data- sets have shown that in the rst experiment the results of the close replication study and the original study were similar in terms of their prole. In the second experiment, the results demonstrated that the QoS model was better than the ranking mechanism in terms of selecting a composite plan that has highest quality score. [Conclusions] No one approach to service composition seemed to meet all needs, but a number has been investigated more. The similarity between the results of the close replication and the original study showed the validity of our simulation framework and a proof that the results of the original study can be replicated. Using the simulation it was demonstrated that the performance of the QoS model was better than the ranking mechanism in terms of the overall quality for a selected plan. The overall objectives of this research are to develop a generic life-cycle model for Web service composition from a mapping study of the literature. This was then used to run simulations to replicate studies on matchmaking and compare selection methods