Yesterday we attended the WebTech Conference at the Holiday Inn Assago in Milan with a short talk on AIR applications on multi-touch surfaces, a talk on how to develop AIR applications that allow multi-touch and multi-user interaction on wide screen surfaces. We presented the implementation of technical solutions and the main development frameworks, as well as some application examples including the work done within the project MediaPick developed by Daniele Pezzatini and designed by Matteo Mancini at MICC.
Daniele Pezzatini presents "AIR applications on multi-touch surfaces" at the WebTech Conference
During the event we had the opportunity to follow some interesting sessions: Luca Mezzalira (mart3 | the Flash Platform Company) who explained how to develop applications with the Flash Platform integrating devices running on Android, Piergiorgio Niero (Kaseya) with a short trip on the new Flash graphics API and coding best practices;and, finally, Gabriele Lana (Clean Code) and Massimiliano Dessì (Pro-netics) who talked about documentary and nosql databases.
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer
In spring 2010 the European Museum Forum (EMF) organized the special discussion “What is good museum today?” in order to formulate the new criteria of the contemporary successful museum. It was clearly stated that one of the key criteria is evaluation of the new audience and the definition of a new type of a museum visitor. New types of audiences are emerging and being recognised, and also new ways of dialoguing with them are becoming part of the arts organisations’ communication strategy. As it was defined by Damien Whitmore (V&A) “the visitor today is everyone who interacts with the museum, whether on location or on the opposite side of the world through web content”.
Natalia Kopelyanskaya
In the future, therefore, a more open approach – and an open mind – is clearly required. The subject was also touched at the EVA Florence Conference in April 2010. The new museum trends in rebranding and extension – like Tate Modern or Centre George Pompidou Metz – is in a way a response to the question how to retain old and reach out to new audiences today and tomorrow.
The evaluation of the museum visitors is on one hand well-rooted museum technology, based mainly on interdisciplinary approach, but on the other hand it is getting more and more complicated and connected to the new technology. The advent of information technologies produced a new type of museum visitor – museum user 2.0 (the model of participatory museum) and, hence the traditional museum has to change its strategy in access and content creation according to that new user profile to remain attractive. Some museums prefer to work with multimedia, inserting display culture, others try to avoid the screens and to create the special realm of storytelling. In all cases museums today have to be very creative and understand how they are perceived by the audience. And that is a crucial point!
How the museum is perceived today by the visitors? What could work as an effective model? Is it still storage of traditional arts and a place of many restrictions?
The lecture will be about above topics, museum context and the possible approach of museum visitors’ evaluation, illustrated by the new museum projects from the Great Britain, Russia and Italy.
The paper “Tag Suggestion and Localization in User-generated Videos based on Social Knowledge” authored by Lamberto Ballan, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo, Marco Meoni, Giuseppe Serra has won the best paper award at the the second ACM SIGMM Workshop on Social Media (WSM2010), in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010.
Example of tag suggestion and localization
The Workshop, organized by Steven C.H. Hoi, Jiebo Luo, Roelof van Zwol, Susanne Boll-Westermann and Ioannis (Yiannis) Kompatsiaris, focused on various aspects of social media. In particular, workshop papers had to elaborate related theory, methodology, algorithms and issues associated to social media content creation, manipulation, content analysis, storage, search, learning and mining.
ScientifiCareers is a project dedicated to job opportunities for young researchers in the field of Multimedia.
The platform aims to promote the connection between the world of research and the industry, and to stimulate the exchange of expertise between different research teams.
ScientifiCareers. Job opportunities for young researcher in Multimedia
ScientifiCareers is a free platform where professionals, industries and academic institutions can post their job requests in order to get in contact with young and talented researchers all over the world. Continue reading →
Alberto Del Bimbo, MICC Director and General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia 2010, interviewed by the staff of Ustation, the University Media Network, describes the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010, organized by MICC for this year, and focuses on various aspects of multimedia and innovation and on the relationships between industry and academia.
ACM Multimedia is considered the most selective conference in the ICT sector and annually brings together scientists and researchers all around the world to discuss and present the most significant research results and innovative applications and solutions.
Among the many side events the Interactive Art Exhibit, a public exhibition of works by contemporary artists engaged in the use of new technologies and of multimedia solutions for the conservation and management of cultural heritage, will be held in the beautiful location of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence.
TANGerINE Tales is a solution for multi-role digital storymaking based on the TANGerINE platform. The goal is to create a digital interactive system for children able to stimulate collaboration between users. The result concerns educational psychology in terms of respect of roles, development of literacy and of narrative skills.
Testing Tangerine Tales
TANGerINE Tales lets children create and tell stories combining landscapes and characters chosen by themselves. Initially, children select the elements that will be part of the game and explore the environment within which they will create their own story. After that they have the chance to record their voice and the dynamics of the game. Finally, they are able to replay the self-made story on the interactive table.
The interaction between the system and users is performed through the tangible interface TANGerINE, consisting of two smart cubes (one for each child) and an interactive table. Users interact with the system through the manipulation of cubes that send data to the computer via a Bluetooth connection.
The main assumption is that the interaction takes place through the collaboration between two children who have different roles: one of them will actively interact to control the actions of the main character of the story, while the other will control the environmental events in response to the movements and actions of the character.
The target user of TANGerINE Tales is made up of 7-8 year olds, attending the third year of elementary school. This choice was made following research studies on psychological methods for collaborative learning, on Human Computer Interaction and tangible interfaces; we exploited the guidelines for learning supported by technological tools (computers, cell phones, tablet PCs, etc..) and those extrapolated by projects of storytelling for children.
The tools for media management, processing, annotation and retrieval developed by MICC within the IM3I project (http://www.im3i.eu) have been successfully tested by a team of NAVA (http://www.nava.hu) archivists during the last project meeting in Budapest.
IM3I user evaluation session by NAVA team in Budapest
These tools allow to manage multimedia collections and make them searchable on the web, and are based on a service-oriented architecture, to ease deployment and integration in existing systems.
Alberto Del Bimbo, MICC Director, will give the keynote speech About 3D of objects, trajectories, and faces… at NEM Networked & Electronic Media Summit organised by the NEM Initiative under the aegis of the European Commission in Hesperia Tower, Barcelona, Spain, on 13-15 October 2010, showing some of the achievements of MICC research on recovering 3D local poses and orientations of objects from a single view, tracking of multiple targets in 3D space from a pan-tilt-zoom camera, and structural face recognition of 3D face scans.
The Hesperia Tower will host the 2010 NEM Summit
About 3D of objects, trajectories, and faces…
Objects exist in a physical, three-dimensional world. Extracting 3D object shapes and appearance from 2D imaged views from active cameras, 3D shape acquisition from scanners, 3D processing to obtain information at both physical and semantic level, are some of the challenges to improve the quality of many applications of computers to real world problems. Prof. Del Bimbo will present and discuss our recent research on the extraction of 3D information on real world objects and scenes and recognition of human identity from the geometry of the 3D anatomical structure of faces.
Alberto Del Bimbo, Media Integration and Communication Center Director
Alberto del Bimbo, MICC Director, will present MICC research activities and results at the Information Day of the Italian National Centers of Excellence on 28 September 2010, at Palazzina dell’Auditorium, Accademia dei Lincei, in Rome, Italy.
The objective of the Conference “The ministerial Centres of Excellence established at the University between 2001 and 2003” is to summarize the activity of the Italian Centres of Excellence founded between 2001 and 2003 and issued by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research
The location chosen is no coincidence Villa Farnesina, the seat of the Accademia dei Lincei. The Academy, founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi, is the oldest scientific academy in the world and counts among its first members Galileo Galilei.
Program:
Registration: 9:00 to 9:30
Greetings Accademia dei Lincei and the authorities: 9:30 to 10:15
Keynote: 10:15 to 10:30 (Prof. J. Meldolesi)
Scientific and technical perspectives of the National Plan for Research (Speakers: Prof. R. Cingolani, Prof. G. De Nicolao and others interventions coordinated by Prof. A. Pinchera): 10:30 to 11:30
Discussion on the results of a decade of Centres of Excellence (Coordinator: Prof. G. Scotti): 11:30 to 13:00
Break: 13:00 to 14:00
Guided tours of the Villa Farnesina: 14:00 to 14:30
Opening of the poster session with activities of each Center of Excellence (Coordinator: Prof. MD Di Benedetto): 14:30 to 17:00
LIT (Lexicon of the Italian Television) is a project conceived by the Accademia della Crusca, the leading research institution on the Italian language, in collaboration with CLIEO (Center for theoretical and historical Linguistics: Italian, European and Oriental languages), with the aim of studying frequencies of the Italian lexicon used in television content and targets the specific sector of web applications for linguistic research. The corpus of transcriptions is constituted approximately by 170 hours of random television recordings transmitted by the national broadcaster RAI (Italian Radio Television) during the year 2006.
LIT: Lexicon of the Italian Television
The principal outcome of the project is the design and implementation of an interactive system which combines a web-based video transcription and annotation tool, a full featured search engine, and a web application, integrated with video streaming, for data visualization and text-video syncing.
The project presents two different interfaces: a search engine, based on classical textual input forms, and another multimedia interface, used both for data visualization and annotation. Annotation functionalities are activated after user’s authentication. The systems relies on a web application backend which has to handle the transcriptions and provide the necessary indexing and search functions.
The browsing interface shows the video collection present in the model. Users can select a video and play it immediately, and read the associated metadata and speech transcription in sync. Each record in the list of videos provides a link to the raw annotation in XML-TEI format, a standard developed by the TEI: Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. The annotation can be opened directly inside the browser and saved on the local systems. Subtitles are displayed at the bottom of the video while segments in the transcription area are automatically highlighted during playback and metadata are updated accordingly. When the text-to-speech alignment is completed through annotation activities, users can select a unit of text inside the transcription area and the video cue-point is aligned accordingly; on the contrary, scrolling the trigger on the annotated video segment highlights the corresponding segment of text.
The annotation interface is accessed by transcriptionists after authentication, and allows to associate the transcription to the corresponding sequences of video. Annotators can set the cue points of speech on the video sequences using the tools provided by the graphic user interface and assign them an annotation without having prior knowledge of the format used. The tool provides functionalities for the definition of metadata at different levels, or multiple “layers”: features can be assigned to the document as a whole, to individual transmissions, to speakers in the transmissions and to each single segment of the transcription.
The search interface is based on standard text input fields. It provides a JSP frontend to the search functions defined for the Java engine and uses the Lucene query syntax for the identification of HTML elements. The interfaces recalls a common ‘advanced search’ form, providing all the boolean combinations usually present in search engines and, for this reason, making users comfortable with basic features. Notably, some uncommon features appears among other fields, such as:
the ‘free sequence’ field, with option for defining it exact, ordered or unordered;
the ‘distance’ parameter, where free sequences can appear within specified ranges inside a single utterance;
the ‘date range’ parameter.
Advanced search features are shown inside dedicated panels which can be expanded if necessary. These panels give all the options for specifying the constraints of a query, as defined for the XML-TEI custom fields used in LIT. The extended parameters allow to:
set the case sensitiveness of a query;
perform a word root expansion of jolly characters present in the query;
set the constraint for specific categories defined in the taxonomy;
select specific parameters for utterances, such as type of speech (improvisation, programmed, executed), speech technique (on scene, voice-over), type of communication (monologue, dialogue), speaker gender and type (professional, non professional).
The system contains 168 hours of RAI (Italian Radio Television) broadcasts, aired during the year 2006. The annotation work was done by researchers of the Accademia della Crusca while LIT was under development, in late 2009. The database has approximately 20.000 utterances stored and using Lucene for search and retrieval does not raise any performance issue.
The system is currently under deployment as a module of the larger national research funding FIRB 2009 VIVIT (Fondo di Investimento per la Ricerca di Base, Vivi l’Italiano), which will integrate the tools and the obtained annotations within a semantic web infrastructure.
