WebMedia 2012 - Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web

KEYNOTES

"Social Information Access: The Other SIde of the Social Web"

School of Information Sciences
University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

Modern Web, which is frequently called Social Web or Web 2.0, celebrates the power of the user community. Most frequently it is associated with the power of users as contributors or various kinds of contents through Wikis, blogs, and resource sharing sites. However, the power of the user community impacts not only the production of Web content, but also access to all kinds of Web content. A number or research groups worldwide work on social information access techniques, which helps users get to the right information using "community wisdom" extracted from tracked actions of those who worked with this information earlier. The talk provides an brief introduction into this research stream and present recent work of our group on several social information access techniques.

Speaker Bio

Peter Brusilovsky is a Professor of Information Science and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs Personalized Adaptive Web Systems (PAWS) lab. Peter has been working in the field of adaptive educational systems, user modeling, and intelligent user interfaces for over 20 years. He published numerous papers and edited several books on adaptive hypermedia and the adaptive Web.He was holding visiting faculty appointments at the Moscow State University (Russia), Sussex University (UK), Tokyo Denki University (Japan), University of Trier (Germany), Free University of Bolzano (Italy), National College of Ireland, and Carnegie Mellon University. Peter is the Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies and a board member of several journals including User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Web Intelligence and Agent Systems. He is also the current President of User Modeling Inc., a professional association of user modeling researchers.

"Socially-Aware Multimedia: Adding Personal and Temporal Contexts to Media"

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and VU University Amsterdam
Netherlands

Abstract

Multimedia has been a significant area of research for over 20 years. During this time, the role of technology has driven the research agenda. Although the user has played a central role in viewing multimedia information, enabling significant end-user interaction with media has not played a seminal role in most aspects of multimedia research. This paper argues that a fresh look at multimedia interaction is required. This 'fresh look,' which I call socially-aware multimedia, is centered on enabling new end-user interaction with media in the long-term social context of the user's social environment. This has implications on how media is encoded, stored, transmitted, viewed and shared. The multi-facetted impact of providing socially-aware multimedia will mean that old assumptions on the nature of media will need to be revisited. A new central role for the user is envisaged for defining, selecting and sharing content.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Dick Bulterman is a senior researcher at CWI in Amsterdam, where since 2004 he heads the Distributed and Interactive Systems group. He is also holds the professorship of Distributed Multimedia Languages and Interfaces with the department of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he teaches and does research within the Computer Systems and Web and Media groups. From 1988-1994 (and briefly in 2002), he led CWI's Department of Computer Systems and Telematics and from 1994 to 1998, he was head of the Multimedia and Human Computer theme. In 1999, he started Oratrix Development BV, a CWI spin-off company that transfered the group's SMIL-based GRiNS software to many parts of the civilized world. In 2002, after handing the responsibilities of CEO over to Mario Wildvanck, he returned to CWI and started up a new research activity at CWI on distributed multimedia systems. Prior to joing CWI in 1988, he was on the faculty of the Division of Engineering at Brown, where he was part of the Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems. Other academic appointments include visiting professorships in computer science at Brown (1993-94) and in the information theory group at TU Delft (1985) and a part-time appointment in computer science at the Univeristy of Utrecht (1989-1991). Dr. Bulterman received a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University (USA) in 1982.

He also holds a Sc.M. in applied mathematics and computer science from Brown (1977) and a B.A. in political economics (with a minor in mathematics) from Hope College (1973). He started his academic journey at Tottenville High School on Staten Island, NY, where he learned (among other things) to play trombone and string bass. He was born in Amstelveen (The Netherlands); after 35 years in the USA, he now resides with his family in Amsterdam. His hobbies include flying airplanes (he holds an FAA private ASEL license with instrument rating and a Dutch commercial pilot's license with IR), singing in the Cantorij of the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam and playing jazz trombone in the Amsterdam band the Jazz Warriors.

Bulterman is co-chair of the W3C Synchronized Multimedia working group and is a member of various conference steering committees. He is on the editorial board of the ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal and Multimedia Tools and Applications. He is a member of Sigma Xi, the ACM and the IEEE.

"Crowdsourcing User Interactions with Web Video"

Visiting Scientist
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Abstract

Content-based video retrieval has been a very efficient technique with new video content, but it has not regarded the increasingly dynamic interactions between users and video content on the Web. The pragmatics of user behavior with web video provides a potential for better user experiences with educational videos, as well as with user generated videos. Thus, there is growing research interest in user-based video modeling approaches through crowdsourcing of users' interactions with the video player. In particular, effective crowdsourcing of user interactions requires further research in multimedia and user modeling, signal processing and big data analytics, and controlled user experiments. Finally, the above concepts are demonstrated in novel systems, experiments, and analyses of user interactions with Web video.

Speaker Bio

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos holds an MEng (Electronics and Computer Engineering, 1999) an MSc (Marketing and Communication, 2001), and a Ph.D. (Human-Computer Interaction, 2004). During his studies and research, he has been affiliated with engineering, business, and applied arts university departments. Since 1997, he has worked in six academic research labs in four countries (Greece, UK, Germany, Norway), which specialize in the areas of multimedia, e-commerce, intelligent systems, computer education, software engineering, and interaction design. He has participated in six EC-funded (FP4, FP5, FP6, FP7) research projects in the field of human-computer interaction for information, communication and entertainment applications in TV, mobile, and ubiquitous computing. In 2002, he founded UITV.INFO, which is a newsletter (currently a discussion-group) and web portal for interactive television research resources (papers, theses), news and events. He is the main author of more than fifty peer-reviewed research articles and he has been lecturing internationally (universities, conferences, tutorials, seminars, guest lectures) on several aspects (design, engineering, science, art) of informatics. He is serving on the steering committee of the European Interactive TV organization and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting and Entertainment Computing.