Summarize Dates First: A Paradigm Shift in Timeline Summarization

Timeline summarization aims at presenting long news stories in a compact manner. State-of-the-art approaches first select the most relevant dates from the original event timeline then produce per-date news summaries. Date selection is driven by either per-date news content or date-level references. When coping with complex event data, characterized by inherent news flow redundancy, this pipeline may encounter relevant issues in both date selection and summarization due to a limited use of news content in date selection and no use of high-level temporal references (e.g., the past month). This paper proposes a paradigm shift in timeline summarization aimed at overcoming the above issues. It presents a new approach, namely Summarize Date First, which focuses on first generating date-level summaries then selecting the most relevant dates on top of summarized knowledge. In the latter stage, it performs date aggregations to consider high-level temporal references as well. The proposed pipeline also supports frequent incremental timeline updates more efficiently than previous approaches. We tested our unsupervised approach both on existing benchmark datasets and on a newly proposed benchmark dataset describing the COVID-19 news timeline. The achieved results were superior to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and competitive against supervised ones

Enhancing cultural tourism by a mixed reality application for outdoor navigation and information browsing using immersive devices

In this paper a mixed reality application is introduced; this application runs on Microsoft Hololens and has been designed to provide information on a city scale. The application was developed to provide information about historical buildings, thus supporting cultural outdoor tourism. The huge amount of multimedia data stored in the archives of the Italian public broadcaster RAI, is used to enrich the user experience. A remote application of image and video analysis receives an image flow by the user and identifies known objects framed in the images. The user can select the object (monument/building/artwork) for which augmented contents have to be displayed (video, text audio); the user can interact with these contents by a set of defined gestures. Moreover, if the object of interest is detected and tracked by the mixed reality application, also 3D contents can be overlapped and aligned with the real world

Director Tools for Autonomous Media Production with a Team of Drones

Featured Application: This work can be applied for media production with aerial cameras. The system supports media crew to film outdoor events with an autonomous fleet of drones.This paper proposes a set of director tools for autonomous media production with a team of drones. There is a clear trend toward using drones for media production, and the director is the person in charge of the whole system from a production perspective. Many applications, mainly outdoors, can benefit from the use of multiple drones to achieve multi-view or concurrent shots. However, there is a burden associated with managing all aspects in the system, such as ensuring safety, accounting for drone battery levels, navigating drones, etc. Even though there exist methods for autonomous mission planning with teams of drones, a media director is not necessarily familiar with them and their language. We contribute to close this gap between media crew and autonomous multi-drone systems, allowing the director to focus on the artistic part. In particular, we propose a novel language for cinematography mission description and a procedure to translate those missions into plans that can be executed by autonomous drones. We also present our director’s Dashboard, a graphical tool allowing the director to describe missions for media production easily. Our tools have been integrated into a real team of drones for media production and we show results of example missions.Unión Europea Sub.No 73166