Learning to Generate Posters of Scientific Papers

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: in Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'16), Phoenix, AZ, 201

Moving from Data-Constrained to Data-Enabled Research: Experiences and Challenges in Collecting, Validating and Analyzing Large-Scale e-Commerce Data

Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large Internet-based data sets in the area of online auctions, music file sharing and online retailer pricing. We demonstrate how such data can advance knowledge by facilitating sharper and more extensive tests of existing theories and by offering observational underpinnings for the development of new theories. Just as experimental economics pushed the frontiers of economic thought by enabling the testing of numerous theories of economic behavior in the environment of a controlled laboratory, we believe that observing, often over extended periods of time, real-world agents participating in market and nonmarket activity on the Internet can lead us to develop and test a variety of new theories. Internet data gathering is not controlled experimentation. We cannot randomly assign participants to treatments or determine event orderings. Internet data gathering does offer potentially large data sets with repeated observation of individual choices and action. In addition, the automated data collection holds promise for greatly reduced cost per observation. Our methods rely on technological advances in automated data collection agents. Significant challenges remain in developing appropriate sampling techniques integrating data from heterogeneous sources in a variety of formats, constructing generalizable processes and understanding legal constraints. Despite these challenges, the early evidence from those who have harvested and analyzed large amounts of e-commerce data points toward a significant leap in our ability to understand the functioning of electronic commerce.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000231 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Media aesthetics based multimedia storytelling.

Since the earliest of times, humans have been interested in recording their life experiences, for future reference and for storytelling purposes. This task of recording experiences --i.e., both image and video capture-- has never before in history been as easy as it is today. This is creating a digital information overload that is becoming a great concern for the people that are trying to preserve their life experiences. As high-resolution digital still and video cameras become increasingly pervasive, unprecedented amounts of multimedia, are being downloaded to personal hard drives, and also uploaded to online social networks on a daily basis. The work presented in this dissertation is a contribution in the area of multimedia organization, as well as automatic selection of media for storytelling purposes, which eases the human task of summarizing a collection of images or videos in order to be shared with other people. As opposed to some prior art in this area, we have taken an approach in which neither user generated tags nor comments --that describe the photographs, either in their local or on-line repositories-- are taken into account, and also no user interaction with the algorithms is expected. We take an image analysis approach where both the context images --e.g. images from online social networks to which the image stories are going to be uploaded--, and the collection images --i.e., the collection of images or videos that needs to be summarized into a story--, are analyzed using image processing algorithms. This allows us to extract relevant metadata that can be used in the summarization process. Multimedia-storytellers usually follow three main steps when preparing their stories: first they choose the main story characters, the main events to describe, and finally from these media sub-groups, they choose the media based on their relevance to the story as well as based on their aesthetic value. Therefore, one of the main contributions of our work has been the design of computational models --both regression based, as well as classification based-- that correlate well with human perception of the aesthetic value of images and videos. These computational aesthetics models have been integrated into automatic selection algorithms for multimedia storytelling, which are another important contribution of our work. A human centric approach has been used in all experiments where it was feasible, and also in order to assess the final summarization results, i.e., humans are always the final judges of our algorithms, either by inspecting the aesthetic quality of the media, or by inspecting the final story generated by our algorithms. We are aware that a perfect automatically generated story summary is very hard to obtain, given the many subjective factors that play a role in such a creative process; rather, the presented approach should be seen as a first step in the storytelling creative process which removes some of the ground work that would be tedious and time consuming for the user. Overall, the main contributions of this work can be capitalized in three: (1) new media aesthetics models for both images and videos that correlate with human perception, (2) new scalable multimedia collection structures that ease the process of media summarization, and finally, (3) new media selection algorithms that are optimized for multimedia storytelling purposes.Postprint (published version

Country Music's "Hurtin' Albertan" : Corb Lund and the Construction of "Geo-Cultural" Identity

Le concept de lieu fait partie intégrante de la musique country, genre musical traditionnellement associé à certaines aires géographiques, à des paysages ruraux et aux valeurs communautaires. Bien que la littérature sur la musique country ait bien cerné les liens entre ce genre musical et la notion de lieu, en particulier en ce qui concerne la géographie des origines du genre et de ses scènes importantes, on observe un intérêt scientifique croissant envers les chansons de plus en plus nombreuses explorant le thème du lieu. Cette tradition trouve ses racines dans les chansons hillbilly, les chansons de cowboys chantants, le bluegrass du Kentucky et le western swing, où les artistes ont exprimé la nostalgie des lieux familiers et du temps de leur enfance. Ces récits ne décrivent pas seulement le paysage et la culture d’aires géographiques données; plutôt, ils définissent la relation entre les individus et leur environnement, dévoilant ainsi le caractère, les valeurs et les croyances de l’artiste. En se concentrant sur la musique de l’artiste canadien de country alternatif Corb Lund, cette thèse vise à définir cette relation entre cet artiste de musique country et son environement, et à interroger la façon dont il utilise (à l’instar d’autres artistes du genre) ces chansons afin d’explorer plus à fond les liens avec ses origines albertaines. Plus précisément, il s’agit d’étudier comment ces récits de lieu contribuent à la construction de l’identité de l’artiste, ce que Simon Frith (1996) appelle la persona. Selon Richard Peterson (1997) et Pamela Fox (2009), les artistes country ont tendance à se référer à leurs origines dans un acte de « sincérité authentique », afin de construire une conception personnalisée du lieu (souvent autobiographique). Cette recherche a dû considérer les multiples couches de signification entourant l’artiste en tenant compte du genre, des niveaux identitaires et des rapports géoculturaux. Les approches géoculturelles et écomusicologiques permettent de mieux comprendre les façons dont les individus réagissent au lieu et aux liens intimes entre le « sentiment de soi » et le « sentiment de lieu » (Tuan 1974; Cantrill 1993; Solomon 2000). Le concept d’identité « géoculturelle », issu des sciences politiques (Talukder 2013), est invoqué pour décrire cette relation. Par l’analyse de la musique de Lund, cette thèse explore les manières dont l’artiste aborde la vie quotidienne, le travail et les questions socioculturelles propres à l’Alberta en proposant diverses conceptions du lieu, tout en construisant sa propre identité géoculturelle albertaine.The concept of place is integral to country music, a genre conventionally associated with geographic regions, rural landscapes, and community values. While country music literature has defined the genre’s connection to place in relation to the geography of its origins and prominent scenes, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the place-themed songs that proliferate the genre. The tradition of place songs finds its roots in early hillbilly recordings, songs of the singing cowboy, Kentucky bluegrass, and western swing, where songwriters expressed nostalgia for the seemingly simpler places and times of their childhood. These narratives do not just describe the landscape and culture of geographic regions, but rather, they also define the relationship between individuals and their surrounding environment and community, unveiling elements of the artist’s character, values, and beliefs. Focusing on the music of Canadian alt-country artist Corb Lund, this dissertation seeks to define this relationship between country singer-songwriter and place, and interrogate how he (like many other country artists) uses place songs to explore more fully his ties to his Albertan origins. More specifically, it is interested in how place-based narratives contribute to the construction of an artist’s identity, what Simon Frith (1996) calls the artistic persona. As both Richard Peterson (1997) and Pamela Fox (2009) have noted, country artists tend to refer to their origins as an act of “authentic sincerity, ” constructing personalized (often autobiographical) conceptions of place. For a study of this nature, it was important to consider the multiple layers of signification surrounding a singer-songwriter including genre, levels of artistic identity, and geographic-cultural (“geo-cultural”) association. Cultural geographic and ecomusicological discourse offers a rich understanding of the ways in which individuals respond to place and the intimate connection between the “sense of self” and the “sense of place” (Tuan 1974; Cantrill 1993; Solomon 2000). The concept “geo-cultural” identity, drawn from the political sciences (Talukder 2013), is invoked to describe this connection and define the geographic-cultural elements of an artist’s identity. Through an interrogation of Lund’s music, this dissertation explores how the singer-songwriter describes life, work, and socio-cultural issues in his native Alberta, creating diverse conceptions of place, all while constructing his uniquely Albertan “geo-cultural” identity

Multimedia Annotation Interoperability Framework

Multimedia systems typically contain digital documents of mixed media types, which are indexed on the basis of strongly divergent metadata standards. This severely hamplers the inter-operation of such systems. Therefore, machine understanding of metadata comming from different applications is a basic requirement for the inter-operation of distributed Multimedia systems. In this document, we present how interoperability among metadata, vocabularies/ontologies and services is enhanced using Semantic Web technologies. In addition, it provides guidelines for semantic interoperability, illustrated by use cases. Finally, it presents an overview of the most commonly used metadata standards and tools, and provides the general research direction for semantic interoperability using Semantic Web technologies

Extraction of Exclusive Video Content from One Shot Video

With the popularity of personal digital devices, the amount of home video data is growing explosively. Many videos may only contain a single shot and are very short and their contents are diverse yet related with few major subjects or events. Users often ne ed to maintain their own video clip collections captured at different locations and time. These unedited and unorganized videos bring difficulties to their management and manipulation. This video composition system is used to generate aesthetically enhanced long - shot videos from short video clips. Our proposed system is to extract the video contents about a specific topic and compose them into a virtual one - shot presentation. All input short video clips are pre - processed and converted as one - shot video. Video frames are detected and categorized by using transition clues like human, object. Human and object frames are separated by implementing a face detection algorithm for the input one - shot video. Viola Jones face detection algorithm is used for separating human and object frames. There are three ingredients in this algorithm, worki ng in concert to enable a fast and a ccurate detection. The integral image for feature computation, adaboost for feature selection and an attentional cascade for efficient computational resource allocation. Objects are then categorized using SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) and SURF ( Speed Up Robust Features) algorithm

Yoruba Culture and Its Influence on The Development of Modern Popular Music in Nigeria

This thesis focuses on the contributions of the Yorùbá culture to the development of modern Nigerian popular music. It traces the origin, conception and growth of popular music styles in Nigeria and highlights the underlying Yorùbá cultural cum linguistic influence that nurtured their growth within the urban space of Lagos city. It examines how contemporary Nigerian popular music practitioners appropriate the Yorùbá culture in negotiating their musical and national identities and counteract popular music homogenization through the creation of hybrid musical styles and cultures. The work adopts a multi-dimensional research approach that involves cultural, musicological, historical, anthropological and socio-linguistical tools. Adopting the participant-observer method with Lagos as the primary fieldwork site, additional data were sourced along with interviews of key informants through bibliographic and discographic methods. The study reveals the importance of Lagos as a major factor that contributed to the development of Nigeria‘s popular music practice as exemplified in genres like jùjú, fújì and afrobeat, and discovers that the Yorùbá language has gradually become the dominant medium through which artists express their musical identity as typified by current mainstream hip hop music. Extending earlier work by scholars such as Barber, Waterman and Euba and recent works in hip hop linguistics by Alim and Omoniyi, the thesis contributes to the growing body of research within popular music through the discipline of ethnomusicology, especially in the emerging area of academic inquiry into indigenous African hip hop culture

A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis of Music-related Practices Discussed within Chipmusic.org

abstract: This study examined discussion forum posts within a website dedicated to a medium and genre of music (chiptunes) with potential for music-centered making, a phrase I use to describe maker culture practices that revolve around music-related purposes. Three research questions guided this study: (1) What chiptune-related practices did members of chipmusic.org discuss between December 30th, 2009 and November 13th, 2017? (2) What do chipmusic.org discussion forum posts reveal about the multidisciplinary aspects of chiptunes? (3) What import might music-centered making evident within chipmusic.org discussion forum posts hold for music education? To address these research questions, I engaged in corpus-assisted discourse analysis tools and techniques to reveal and analyze patterns of discourse within 245,098 discussion forum posts within chipmusic.org. The analysis cycle consisted of (a) using corpus analysis techniques to reveal patterns of discourse across and within data consisting of 10,892,645 words, and (b) using discourse analysis techniques for a close reading of revealed patterns. Findings revealed seven interconnected themes of chiptune-related practices: (a) composition practices, (b) performance practices, (c) maker practices, (d) coding practices, (e) entrepreneurial practices, (f), visual art practices, and (g) community practices. Members of chipmusic.org primarily discussed composing and performing chiptunes on a variety of instruments, as well as through retro computer and video game hardware. Members also discussed modifying and creating hardware and software for a multitude of electronic devices. Some members engaged in entrepreneurial practices to promote, sell, buy, and trade with other members. Throughout each of the revealed themes, members engaged in visual art practices, as well as community practices such as collective learning, collaborating, constructive criticism, competitive events, and collective efficacy. Findings suggest the revealed themes incorporated practices from a multitude of academic disciplines or fields of study for music-related purposes. However, I argue that many of the music-related practices people discussed within chipmusic.org are not apparent within music education discourse, curricula, or standards. I call for an expansion of music education discourse and practices to include additional ways of being musical through practices that might borrow from multiple academic disciplines or fields of study for music-related purposes.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Music Education 201

Peekaboo: A Hub-Based Approach to Enable Transparency in Data Processing within Smart Homes (Extended Technical Report)

We present Peekaboo, a new privacy-sensitive architecture for smart homes that leverages an in-home hub to pre-process and minimize outgoing data in a structured and enforceable manner before sending it to external cloud servers. Peekaboo's key innovations are (1) abstracting common data pre-processing functionality into a small and fixed set of chainable operators, and (2) requiring that developers explicitly declare desired data collection behaviors (e.g., data granularity, destinations, conditions) in an application manifest, which also specifies how the operators are chained together. Given a manifest, Peekaboo assembles and executes a pre-processing pipeline using operators pre-loaded on the hub. In doing so, developers can collect smart home data on a need-to-know basis; third-party auditors can verify data collection behaviors; and the hub itself can offer a number of centralized privacy features to users across apps and devices, without additional effort from app developers. We present the design and implementation of Peekaboo, along with an evaluation of its coverage of smart home scenarios, system performance, data minimization, and example built-in privacy features.Comment: 18 page