Capturing TV user behaviour in fictional character descriptions

This work is part of the On-demand IPTV project, conducted by Acreo and SICS with financing from Vinnova and active support from an industrial consortium. The main goal of the project is to study the demands on cost-effective, scalable video-on-demand networks that can deliver video with high-quality with minor quality degradations in the transmission. An important issue in understanding this situation is to explore future user behaviour (and the resulting traffic patterns) when user can choose a mix of broadcast TV and a large number of on-demand channels and services. This paper reports on the first steps to develop an understanding of IPTV user behaviour by investigating the current situation using archetypical, fictional character descriptions often referred to as personas. This is an intermediate version; the final version will be the result of Task 4.1: User requirements analysis, part of WP 4: User needs and behaviour

Enhancing Web-Based Configuration with Recommendations and Cluster-Based Help

In a collaborative project with Tacton AB, we have investigated new ways of assisting the user in the process of on-line product configuration. A web-based prototype, RIND, was built for ephemeral users in the domain of PC configuration

How to choose and how to watch: an on-demand perspective on current TV practices

In Sweden, digital TV services have until very recently not been accessible to most people through the TV set. At the same time, TV channels offer more and more content on the web and the majority of the population has access to high-speed internet connections. A web survey aimed at investigating attitudes and behavior related to on-demand TV was distributed in December 2008 to 52 households in an experimental, open (operator neutral) access network in Sweden. Questions were posed on TV arrangements, habits and attitudes; social aspects of TV watching; watching film or TV on-demand; and watching film or TV using the computer. Complementary interviews were also performed with participants that were not part of the experimental environment. Results show that participants in the studies understood and felt a need for time-shift and on-demand TV services: time-shift needs for re-scheduling, catch-up and repeats were expressed as well as on-demand needs for movies and for accessing otherwise unavailable TV content. Support for on-demand TV could also be found in that subjects reported little need for viewing TV content according to a broadcast schedule, with the main exception of news, sports events and other live broadcasts

On the design of television as a service based on average TV watching

Ten households were interviewed about their TV watching to inform the design of TV services. Our participants were average TV viewers who had Internet access but were not technically advanced or frequent users of the Internet as a source for TV material. We found that the flow of programs that broadcast television brings to viewers was the most important motivation for our participants to turn to the TV on-demand possibilities they had access to. Examples of triggers were social cues from people talking about things seen on TV, or time-shifting issues such as missing all or part of programs in the broadcast flow. Special interests such as sports were also a strong motivation for on-demand behavior. For the viewers, linear and on-demand TV watching was intertwined. We conclude that on-demand services should be integrated with broadcast TV in the design of future TV services

Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space

Mobile settings are not only physically and digitally mediated; they are also inhabited by people - a social space. We argue that careful design exposing the connections, gaps, overlays and mismatches within and between physical, digital and social space allow for a better understanding and thereby mastering of the resulting combined space. Two concepts are explored in MobiTip, a social mobile service for exchanging opinions among peers: intramedia seams concerning network coverage and position technology, and intermedia seams between digitally transmitted tips and the physical, social context surrounding the user. We introduce social positioning as an alternative and complement to the current strive for seamless connectedness and exact positioning in physical space

ConCall: An information service for researchers based on EdInfo

In this paper, we present new types of web information services, where users and information brokers collaborate in creating a user-adaptive information service. Such services impose a novel task on information brokers: they become responsible for maintaining the inference strategies used in user modeling. In return, information brokers obtain more accurate information about user needs, since the adaptivity ensures that user profiles are kept up to date and consistent with what users actually prefer, not only what they say that they prefer. We illustrate the approach by an example application, in which conference calls are collected and distributed to interested readers

CHORUS Deliverable 4.3: Report from CHORUS workshops on national initiatives and metadata

Minutes of the following Workshops: • National Initiatives on Multimedia Content Description and Retrieval, Geneva, October 10th, 2007. • Metadata in Audio-Visual/Multimedia production and archiving, Munich, IRT, 21st – 22nd November 2007 Workshop in Geneva 10/10/2007 This highly successful workshop was organised in cooperation with the European Commission. The event brought together the technical, administrative and financial representatives of the various national initiatives, which have been established recently in some European countries to support research and technical development in the area of audio-visual content processing, indexing and searching for the next generation Internet using semantic technologies, and which may lead to an internet-based knowledge infrastructure. The objective of this workshop was to provide a platform for mutual information and exchange between these initiatives, the European Commission and the participants. Top speakers were present from each of the national initiatives. There was time for discussions with the audience and amongst the European National Initiatives. The challenges, communalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impact, success criteria, etc. were tackled. This workshop addressed how these national initiatives could work together and benefit from each other. Workshop in Munich 11/21-22/2007 Numerous EU and national research projects are working on the automatic or semi-automatic generation of descriptive and functional metadata derived from analysing audio-visual content. The owners of AV archives and production facilities are eagerly awaiting such methods which would help them to better exploit their assets.Hand in hand with the digitization of analogue archives and the archiving of digital AV material, metadatashould be generated on an as high semantic level as possible, preferably fully automatically. All users of metadata rely on a certain metadata model. All AV/multimedia search engines, developed or under current development, would have to respect some compatibility or compliance with the metadata models in use. The purpose of this workshop is to draw attention to the specific problem of metadata models in the context of (semi)-automatic multimedia search

Paper Prototyping a Social Mobile Service

Methods for design and evaluation of interactive applications are not readily applicable to mobile services. By modifying an existing paper prototyping method we evaluated a mobile social service for providing user-based tips in a shopping mall. The evaluation showed that tips can be pushed to users and that they can accept that a complex user interface is presented on a small screen. Although the evaluation took place in an office environment, we received feedback on functionality of the service in the context of the shopping mall. Our evaluation indicates that simple prototyping techniques can be used for informative evaluations of mobile services that are heavily context dependent

News on demand considered useless: An explorative assessment of database news publication features

this paper describes the video scenario, details the interviews and their results, answers the main questions tentatively and finaLLy identifies what appears to be promising research direction

CHORUS Deliverable 3.4: Vision Document

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit)