Indexing of fictional video content for event detection and summarisation

This paper presents an approach to movie video indexing that utilises audiovisual analysis to detect important and meaningful temporal video segments, that we term events. We consider three event classes, corresponding to dialogues, action sequences, and montages, where the latter also includes musical sequences. These three event classes are intuitive for a viewer to understand and recognise whilst accounting for over 90% of the content of most movies. To detect events we leverage traditional filmmaking principles and map these to a set of computable low-level audiovisual features. Finite state machines (FSMs) are used to detect when temporal sequences of specific features occur. A set of heuristics, again inspired by filmmaking conventions, are then applied to the output of multiple FSMs to detect the required events. A movie search system, named MovieBrowser, built upon this approach is also described. The overall approach is evaluated against a ground truth of over twenty-three hours of movie content drawn from various genres and consistently obtains high precision and recall for all event classes. A user experiment designed to evaluate the usefulness of an event-based structure for both searching and browsing movie archives is also described and the results indicate the usefulness of the proposed approach

Special Issue on Smart Data and Semantics in a Sensor World

Introduction Since its first inception in 2001, the application of the Semantic Web [1, 2] has carried out an extensive use of ontologies [3–5], reasoning, and semantics in diverse fields, such as Information Integration, Software Engineering, Bioinformatics, eGovernment, eHealth, and social networks. This widespread use of ontologies has led to an incredible advance in the development of techniques to manipulate, share, reuse, and integrate information across heterogeneous data sources. In recent years, the growth of the IoT (Internet of Things) required to face the challenges of “Big Data” [6–10]. The cost of sensors is decreasing, while their use is expanding. Moreover, the use of multiple personal smart devices is an emerging trend and all of them can embed sensors to monitor the surrounding environment. Therefore, the number of available sensors is exploding. On the one hand, the flows of sensor data are massive and continuous, and the data could be obtained in real time or with a delay of just a few seconds. Then, the volume of sensor data is increasing continuously every day. On the other hand, the variety of data being generated is also increasing, due to plenty of different devices and different measures to record. There are many kinds of structured and unstructured sensor data in diverse formats. Moreover, data veracity, which is the degree of accuracy or truthfulness of a data set, is an important aspect to consider. In the context of sensor data, it represents the trustworthiness of the data source and the processing of data. The need for more accurate and reliable data was always declared, but often overlooked for the sake of larger and cheaper..

Editorial for the special issue: “Novel Solutions or Novel Approaches in Operational Research”

This special issue of Business Systems Research (SI of BSR) is co-published by the Slovenian Society INFORMATIKA – Section for Operational Research (SSI – SOR) and highlights recent advances in operations research and management science (OR/MS), with a focus on linking OR/MS with other areas of quantitative and qualitative methods in a multidisciplinary framework. Nine papers that have been selected for this SI of BSR present improvements and new techniques (methodology) in operations research (OR) and their use in various fields of business, economics, spatial science and location

The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review. These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production. As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted. We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.Peer Reviewe