SportsAnno: what do you think?

The automatic summarisation of sports video is of growing importance with the increased availability of on-demand content. Consumers who are unable to view events live often have a desire to watch a summary which allows then to quickly come to terms with all that has happened during a sporting event. Sports forums show that it is not only summaries that are desirable but also the opportunity to share one’s own point of view and discuss the opinions with a community of similar users. In this paper we give an overview of the ways in which annotations have been used to augment existing visual media. We present SportsAnno, a system developed to summarise World Cup 2006 matches and provide a means for open discussion of events within these matches

Query independent measures of annotation and annotator impact

The modern-day web-user plays a far more active role in the creation of content for the web as a whole. In this paper we present Annoby, a free-text annotation system built to give users a more interactive experience of the events of the Rugby World Cup 2007. Annotations can be used for query-independent ranking of both the annotations and the original recorded video footage (or documents) which has been annotated, based on the social interactions of a community of users. We present two algorithms, AuthorRank and MessageRank, designed to take advantage of these interactions so as to provide a means of ranking documents by their social impact

SIGIR: scholar vs. scholars' interpretation

Google Scholar allows researchers to search through a free and extensive source of information on scientific publications. In this paper we show that within the limited context of SIGIR proceedings, the rankings created by Google Scholar are both significantly different and very negatively correlated with those of domain experts

Utilising wearable and environmental sensors to identify the context of gait performance in the home

In this paper we describe our work on the development of a multi-sensory deployment within the homes of elderly people prone to falling. The aim of our work is to provide both preventative guidance with regards to environmental hazards, as well as to create rich information context around gait performance, near-falls or falls that do happen so the cause can be diagnosed more thoroughly. We use a gait analysis platform developed at the TRIL Centre, coupled with a SenseCam wearable camera, to identify the activities and the location in the home during walking activities. In addition to this, and to add even more context, we use home energy- monitoring to enhance our understanding of activities and activity patterns in the home. This method could support older people in identifying a key problem and allow the participant to modify their behaviour or environment to limit or prevent future occurrences

Coping with noise in a real-world weblog crawler and retrieval system

In this paper we examine the effects of noise when creating a real-world weblog corpus for information retrieval. We focus on the DiffPost (Lee et al. 2008) approach to noise removal from blog pages, examining the difficulties encountered when crawling the blogosphere during the creation of a real-world corpus of blog pages. We introduce and evaluate a number of enhancements to the original DiffPost approach in order to increase the robustness of the algorithm. We then extend DiffPost by looking at the anchor-text to text ratio, and dis- cover that the time-interval between crawls is more impor- tant to the successful application of noise-removal algorithms within the blog context, than any additional improvements to the removal algorithm itself

Social impact retrieval: measuring author influence on information retrieval

The increased presence of technologies collectively referred to as Web 2.0 mean the entire process of new media production and dissemination has moved away from an authorcentric approach. Casual web users and browsers are increasingly able to play a more active role in the information creation process. This means that the traditional ways in which information sources may be validated and scored must adapt accordingly. In this thesis we propose a new way in which to look at a user's contributions to the network in which they are present, using these interactions to provide a measure of authority and centrality to the user. This measure is then used to attribute an query-independent interest score to each of the contributions the author makes, enabling us to provide other users with relevant information which has been of greatest interest to a community of like-minded users. This is done through the development of two algorithms; AuthorRank and MessageRank. We present two real-world user experiments which focussed around multimedia annotation and browsing systems that we built; these systems were novel in themselves, bringing together video and text browsing, as well as free-text annotation. Using these systems as examples of real-world applications for our approaches, we then look at a larger-scale experiment based on the author and citation networks of a ten year period of the ACM SIGIR conference on information retrieval between 1997-2007. We use the citation context of SIGIR publications as a proxy for annotations, constructing large social networks between authors. Against these networks we show the effectiveness of incorporating user generated content, or annotations, to improve information retrieval

An investigation of term weighting approaches for microblog retrieval

The use of effective term frequency weighting and document length normalisation strategies have been shown over a number of decades to have a significant positive effect for document retrieval. When dealing with much shorter documents, such as those obtained from microblogs, it would seem intuitive that these would have less benefit. In this paper we investigate their effect on microblog retrieval performance using the Tweets2011 collection from the TREC 2011 Microblog Track

The solvent extraction behaviour of chromium with Bis (2,4,4-trimethylpentyl) phosphinic acid (Cyanex [R] 272)

The bulk of the world's known nickel reserves are contained in laterite ores but sulphidic ores remain the main source of the Western world's nickel production. With the continuing increase in nickel consumption and the depletion of sulphidic ores, the traditional source of nickel, the extraction of nickel from lateritic ores has been the subject of research interest worldwide. Advances in pressure acid leaching (PAL) technology have resulted in significant commercial attempts to extract nickel from these ores. Leaching the ore with sulphuric acid at elevated temperatures and pressures allows almost complete dissolution of the nickel and cobalt, a valuable byproduct of these ores, but yields highly contaminated pregnant leach solutions. Separating and purifying the nickel and cobalt from these solutions remains a hindrance to full commercial production. Several purifying techniques have been commercialised but all suffer from continuing technical problems. Among them, however, the direct solvent extraction (DSX) technique offers several advantages. Direct solvent extraction involves the separation of the nickel and cobalt directly from the partially neutralised pregnant liquor stream (PLS) by solvent extraction with Cyanex(R) 272 as the extractant. However certain contaminants adversely affect the solvent extraction process. Among them is chromium and little is known about the solvent extraction behaviour of this metal. The present work investigated the solvent extraction of chromium with Cyanex(R) 272. It was found that the solvent extraction behaviour of chromium(III) and chromium(VI), both of which could be found in PAL-generated PLS, are distinctly different.For chromium(III), solvent extraction tests showed that (a) it is extracted in the pH range 4-7; (b) the extraction is partly influenced by diffusion; (c) the apparent equilibration time is significantly longer than most transition metals; (d) increases in temperature from 22 to 40 C resulted in increases in the extraction; (e) the pH0.5 increases in the order nitrate < chloride < sulphate in the presence of these anions; (f) the presence of acetate depresses extraction of chromium(III) when the solution is allowed to stand before extraction; (g) in the PLS, chromium(III) precipitated at lower pH than that predicted by the solubility product principle; and (h) the pH0.5 decreases as the Cyanex(R) 272 concentration increases. Chromium(III) is initially extracted by solvation of its inner sphere complex, which then undergoes further reaction in the organic phase leading to the formation of a much more stable species that is difficult to strip. A reaction scheme together with a description of both the initially extracted and resulting stable species is proposed. Extraction of chromium(VI), on the other hand, (a) occurs at pH less than 2 by solvation of chromic acid; (b) is independent of the aqueous phase composition; (c) does not occur in the pH range (3-6) used in the separation of nickel and cobalt. The latter is irrespective of temperature up to 40 C, the use of industrial PLS as the aqueous phase or the presence of an anti-oxidant in the organic phase. The stripping of chromium(III) from a loaded organic phase can be achieved using 1-4 mol L-1 mineral acids provided the stable organic species have not formed making industrial scale stripping of chromium(III) from Cyanex(R) 272 difficult. The exact composition of the aqueous phase during extraction affects the stripping efficiency