An interactive machine learning system for image advertisements

Advertising is omnipresent in all countries around the world and has a strong influence on consumer behavior. Given that advertisements aim to be memorable, attract attention and convey the intended information in a limited space, it seems striking that previous research in economics and management has mostly neglected the content and style of actual advertisements and their evolution over time. With this in mind, we collected more than one million print advertisements from the English-language weekly news magazine “The Economist” from 1843 to 2014. However, there is a lack of interactive intelligent systems capable of processing such a vast amount of image data and allowing users to automatically and manually add metadata, explore images, find and test assertions, and use machine learning techniques they did not have access to before. Inspired by the research field of interactive machine learning, we propose such a system that enables domain experts like marketing scholars to process and analyze this huge collection of image advertisements

Towards Automatic Parsing of Structured Visual Content through the Use of Synthetic Data

Structured Visual Content (SVC) such as graphs, flow charts, or the like are used by authors to illustrate various concepts. While such depictions allow the average reader to better understand the contents, images containing SVCs are typically not machine-readable. This, in turn, not only hinders automated knowledge aggregation, but also the perception of displayed in-formation for visually impaired people. In this work, we propose a synthetic dataset, containing SVCs in the form of images as well as ground truths. We show the usage of this dataset by an application that automatically extracts a graph representation from an SVC image. This is done by training a model via common supervised learning methods. As there currently exist no large-scale public datasets for the detailed analysis of SVC, we propose the Synthetic SVC (SSVC) dataset comprising 12,000 images with respective bounding box annotations and detailed graph representations. Our dataset enables the development of strong models for the interpretation of SVCs while skipping the time-consuming dense data annotation. We evaluate our model on both synthetic and manually annotated data and show the transferability of synthetic to real via various metrics, given the presented application. Here, we evaluate that this proof of concept is possible to some extend and lay down a solid baseline for this task. We discuss the limitations of our approach for further improvements. Our utilized metrics can be used as a tool for future comparisons in this domain. To enable further research on this task, the dataset is publicly available at https://bit.ly/3jN1pJ

Advertising information and communication technologies over time: An analysis of text and visual complexity

In this paper we study how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been advertised over time. More specifically, our research objective is to explore and reveal how ICT advertisements have changed over the last 121 years, adapting ad technologies and content to diffuse innovations from niche into mainstream markets. We do so by using machine learning approaches to identify relevant ICT advertisements in a data set of historical print ads ranging until 2014. We find that first, the diffusion of different ICTs in advertising differs. For example, while the fax was heavily advertised during a short period of time, the typewriter or TV were advertised for a prolonged time. Second, we show that ICTs tend to be characterized by relatively complex advertisements, with content-rich images and more words. This is especially true in the beginning of the product lifecycle of new innovative ICTs but less so towards the end