Towards a Smart Drone Cinematographer for Filming Human Motion

Affordable consumer drones have made capturing aerial footage more convenient and accessible. However, shooting cinematic motion videos using a drone is challenging because it requires users to analyze dynamic scenarios while operating the controller. In this thesis, our task is to develop an autonomous drone cinematography system to capture cinematic videos of human motion. We understand the system's filming performance to be influenced by three key components: 1) video quality metric, which measures the aesthetic quality -- the angle, the distance, the image composition -- of the captured video, 2) visual feature, which encapsulates the visual elements that influence the filming style, and 3) camera planning, which is a decision-making model that predicts the next best movement. By analyzing these three components, we designed two autonomous drone cinematography systems using both heuristic-based methods and learning-based methods.For the first system, we designed an Autonomous CinemaTography system -- "ACT" by proposing a viewpoint quality metric focusing on the visibility of the 3D human skeleton of the subject. We expanded the application of human motion analysis and simplified manual control by assisting viewpoint selection using a through-the-lens method. For the second system, we designed an imitation-based system that learns the artistic intention of the cameramen through watching professional aerial videos. We designed a camera planner that analyzes the video contents and previous camera motion to predict future camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a planning framework, which can imitate a filming style by ``seeing" only one single demonstration video of such style. We named it ``one-shot imitation filming." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that extends imitation learning to autonomous filming. Experimental results in both simulation and field test exhibit significant improvements over existing techniques and our approach managed to help inexperienced pilots capture cinematic videos

Collective Intelligence - Consenting to Conscient Consultation

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Disney, Uber, Tinder, etc.: ours is the generation that has got a World Wide Web to their fingertips; in addition, we often feel like the net has analogously become a kind of add-on to our minds, i.e., an extension to our intellectual capacity. Browsing on the internet, emailing, skyping, googling, chatting, posting texts, photos or videos on social media, whilst interacting with contents that can be as informative as the news broadcast and as entertaining as playing videogames or streaming music, films, and series via applications (apps) downloaded on smart devices have thus been gradually becoming some of our generation’s daily activities of choice. Along these lines, whilst meaning to conceptualise a method for studying an alternative to our present-day prescriptive educational practices, I elaborate a constructivist approach towards the transformative paradigm of a transmedia-interactive produsage. That is, in this MA Thesis I propose the produsage of a cyclic program in which educators could cooperatively consent on a conscient consultation of their prodused contents in a knowledge democratisation exercise. These experts could thereby participate on the mediation, moderation, and mediatisation of a (n)ethnographic e-volution on the road to a sociocultural empowerment and a civic emancipation movement, striving for critical reforms that would pursue the autonomous automatisation of self-regulatory socio-cultures. Comparatively, from this study’s standpoint, the arguably participative factor of the existing Participatory Web resembles the speculative political empowerment triggered by the act of voting for a political candidate: because, in both cases, the options presented to the public regularly are pre-established by the few de facto empowered decision-makers, like e.g., the heads of political parties and coalitions on one hand, or content writers and producers on another. Alternatively, in this thesis I will look into concealed alternatives for (or, preferably, against) what has gradually developed into the modus operandi of media and technology businesses: the monetisation of information by the commodification of produsers. More specifically, I hope to analyse if, inasmuch as ICTs have been democratising knowledge, they also have been contributing to the prospective quest for more maximalist, and collective, forms of participation during our (Western societies’) history. Notwithstanding, this thesis is a theoretical study, and therefore, here I will not present an empirical example of such educative interaction: which I deliberately call eduraction. Appropriately, because the academia continuously gains new insights with the intersection and compilation of our human cognition, – viz., with our collective intelligence (CI) – I understand that constructivist edutainment and pedagogical participation practices can be interchangeably employed towards a civic engagement – as presented in this thesis’ results. Accordingly, the discussion that I intend to incite with this research theoretically refers to the possible implementation of artefacts for mediatising our civic participation, towards the radical sense of democracy via a critical constructivist education. In short, here, I aim to explain how interactive media create collective intelligence, by analysing what decentralisation of power is engendered by produsage and why edutaining praxis ought to spur a civic participation. As a result, in this study I will hypothesise the emergence of a 21st century conscientisation praxis. All in all, educators are enthusiasts, connoisseurs, collecting, curating, collaborating, criticising, converging, and creating contents that synthesise and might materialise meaningful methods and manners for systematically reasoning, negotiating, or promoting a collective, constructivist, and perchance transformative and participative (democratic) utopia. Ultimately, instructors are a medium of knowledge; and be that as it may, nobody knows all, but the sum of all known by each of us is all the knowledge of our multi-millenary humanity. Thence, we ought to find ways of collaboratively connecting the dots with our bits and pieces of information. Until very recently, many considered the efforts for conceptualising networks, in which meaningful thematics could be broadly discussed (by people from different ethnicities all over the world), just as naïve as utopic. Indeed, it is still debatable whether interactive media, in the current state of Web 2.0, do provide such effectual possibilities to its users. On the other hand, it is with the purpose of adding to this debate that I endeavour to investigate quiescent means for collaboratively working on a critical upgrade to the denotation of democracy. As a matter of fact, technology, etymologically, is the study of crafts; and this MA Thesis endeavours to deal with the sociocultural factors and artefacts that we create to assist our kind’s evolving signification of civilisation. With this in mind, for concluding this thesis with a theorisation on yet untapped possibilities within produsage, I look into some of the latest media developments which could possibly contribute to meaningful improvements on our practices of participative citizenship. Then, in such hyperlinked hypothesis, educative matters of various thematic universes could be cooperatively taught by doyens, through networked lectures, with new hypertexts being added to the storylines of their lessons inasmuch as they were being produced and curated, as a critique to divergent interpretations on those phenomena previously presented via a unique interactive-video production. In that event, interactive media could create a Collective Intelligence, by means of an edutaining praxis which could spur a civic participation for democratising knowledge via produsage – in turn, (re-)creating and cyclically transforming our collective intelligence. Like this, such media type would theoretically serve as a wikinomical platform

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Mediating the Spatiality of Conflicts:

Conflict, when dislodged from its conventional understanding as a process and system of war and destruction exclusively, may be apprehended as an experimental method for analysis and synthesis, as a potent resource for pedagogy, for disruptive design and for the production of theory. In this sense, conflict produces more than the eradication of (the possibility of) life and its supporting structures: conflict produces transitional spaces at different scales, of differentiated material ecologies and site-specific meanings in relation to their global position. Conflicts are both locations and explanations of often ‘seductive’ images of destruction offered by popular (and other) media: ruined architectures, dead (or barely alive) bodies, forced migratory movements, impermanent infrastructures and settlements, as well as the tracing and construction of borders, real-estate driven post-war reconstruction processes, etc. The emphasis on the mediatic aspect in the concept of conflict, may be seen as a way of triggering trans- and interdisciplinary discussions, conversations and encounters that serve as a negotiation between conditions of violence and new — or alternative — possibilities for everyday life. Artistic mediations could be as effective as violence in resolving conflicts, but operate through other means and through other channels, thus truly producing new power relations and alternative ways of political struggle. This exposing of conflict and violence through the artistic work is an activist act, but more importantly an artistic and technological mediation. The agency of the artistic work in terms of conflict, then, is situated in the capacity of visualising the conflict, creating awareness of its consequences, its side-effects, its collateral damage. And the creating of awareness and the becoming of fertile ground for protest and the creation of alternative realities. At a three-day conference held at the TU Delft on November 6-8, 2019 researchers, scholars, activists, practitioners and artists presented individual papers that addressed the relationships between spatiality, mediation and conflict from a variety of perspectives. In addition to academic paper contributions, the conference welcomed other proposals in different formats and media: audio-visual material (film, video, photography), digital or physical archives, experimental design proposals, installations, performances, etc. The thematic core of the conference explored new — or innovative — theoretical and methodological approaches and insights on: (1) Spaces of conflict as transitional spaces of material interactions between violence and everyday life; and (2) Spaces of memory as transformative space of violence)

Mediating the Spatiality of Conflicts:

Conflict, when dislodged from its conventional understanding as a process and system of war and destruction exclusively, may be apprehended as an experimental method for analysis and synthesis, as a potent resource for pedagogy, for disruptive design and for the production of theory. In this sense, conflict produces more than the eradication of (the possibility of) life and its supporting structures: conflict produces transitional spaces at different scales, of differentiated material ecologies and site-specific meanings in relation to their global position. Conflicts are both locations and explanations of often ‘seductive’ images of destruction offered by popular (and other) media: ruined architectures, dead (or barely alive) bodies, forced migratory movements, impermanent infrastructures and settlements, as well as the tracing and construction of borders, real-estate driven post-war reconstruction processes, etc. The emphasis on the mediatic aspect in the concept of conflict, may be seen as a way of triggering trans- and interdisciplinary discussions, conversations and encounters that serve as a negotiation between conditions of violence and new — or alternative — possibilities for everyday life. Artistic mediations could be as effective as violence in resolving conflicts, but operate through other means and through other channels, thus truly producing new power relations and alternative ways of political struggle. This exposing of conflict and violence through the artistic work is an activist act, but more importantly an artistic and technological mediation. The agency of the artistic work in terms of conflict, then, is situated in the capacity of visualising the conflict, creating awareness of its consequences, its side-effects, its collateral damage. And the creating of awareness and the becoming of fertile ground for protest and the creation of alternative realities. At a three-day conference held at the TU Delft on November 6-8, 2019 researchers, scholars, activists, practitioners and artists presented individual papers that addressed the relationships between spatiality, mediation and conflict from a variety of perspectives. In addition to academic paper contributions, the conference welcomed other proposals in different formats and media: audio-visual material (film, video, photography), digital or physical archives, experimental design proposals, installations, performances, etc. The thematic core of the conference explored new — or innovative — theoretical and methodological approaches and insights on: (1) Spaces of conflict as transitional spaces of material interactions between violence and everyday life; and (2) Spaces of memory as transformative space of violence)

Social Media and the perfect crime: Towards the death of reality, representation and the murder of resistance.

Master'sMASTER OF ART

Making Copyright Work for the Asian Pacific

This book provides a contemporary overview of developing areas of copyright law in the Asian Pacific region. While noting the tendency towards harmonisation through free trade agreements, the book takes the perspective that there is a significant amount of potential for the nations of the Asian Pacific region to work together, find common ground and shift international bargaining power. Moreover, in so doing, the region can tailor any regional agreements to suit local needs. The book addresses the development of norms in the region and the ways in which this can occur in light of the specific nature of the creator–owner–user paradigm in the region and the common interests of Indigenous peoples