Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.

Digital Watermarking

User Generated Content (UGC) is re-shaping the way people watch video and TV, with millions of video producers and consumers. In particular, UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns and social interactions, empowering users to be more creative, and developing new business opportunities. To better understand the impact of UGC systems, we have analyzed YouTube, the world's largest UGC VoD system. Based on a large amount of data collected, we provide an in-depth study of YouTube and other similar UGC systems. In particular, we study the popularity life-cycle of videos, the intrinsic statistical properties of requests and their relationship with video age, and the level of content aliasing or of illegal content in the system. We also provide insights on the potential for more efficient UGC VoD systems (e.g. utilizing P2P techniques or making better use of caching). Finally, we discuss the opportunities to leverage the latent demand for niche videos that are not reached today due to information filtering effects or other system scarcity distortions. Overall, we believe that the results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding UGC systems and can provide valuable information to ISPs, site administrators, and content owners with major commercial and technical implications.

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I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system

An interactive television program guide with remote access is provided. The interactive television program guide is implemented on interactive television program guide equipment. A remote program guide access device is connected to the interactive television program guide equipment by a remote access link to provide a user with remote access to program guide functions. An interactive television program guide system based on multiple user television equipment devices in a single household is provided. The system provides a user with an opportunity to adjust program guide settings with a given one of the interactive television program guides. Program guide setting include features related to setting program reminders, profiles, program recording features, messaging features, favorites features, parental control features, program guide set up features (e.g., audio and video and language settings), etc.

Interactive television program guide with remote access

A system for integrating video programming with the vast information resources of the Internet. A computer-based system receives a video program with embedded uniform resource locators (URLs). The URLs, the effective addresses of locations or Web sites on the Internet, are interpreted by the system and direct the system to the Web site locations to retrieve related Web pages. Upon receipt of the Web pages by the system, the Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display. The video program signal can be displayed on a video window on a conventional personal computer screen. The actual retrieved Web pages are time stamped to also be displayed, on another portion of the display screen, when predetermined related video content is displayed in the video window. As an alternative, the computer-based system receives the URLs directly through an Internet connection, at times specified by TV broadcasters in advance. The system interprets the URLs and retrieves the appropriate Web pages. The Web pages are synchronized to the video content for display in conjunction with a television program being broadcast to the user at that time. This alternative system allows the URLs to be entered for live transmission to the user.

Enhanced video programming system and method for incorporating and displaying retrieved integrated Internet information segments

A system and method for scheduling the receipt of desired movies and other forms of data from a network which simultaneously distributes many sources of such data to many customers, as in a cable television system. Customer profiles are developed for the recipient describing how important certain characteristics of the broadcast video program, movie or other data are to each customer. From these profiles, an 'agreement matrix' (908) is calculated by comparing the recipient's profiles to the actual profiles of the characteristics of the available video programs, movies, or other data. The agreement matrix (908) thus characterizes the attractiveness of each video program, movie, or other data to each prospective customer. 'Virtual' channels are generated from the agreement matrix (908) to produce a series of video or data programming which will provide the greatest satisfaction to each customer. Feedback paths (1020, 1024) are also provided so that the customer's profiles and/or the profiles of the video programs or other data may be modified to reflect actual usage, and so that the data downloaded to the customer's set top terminal (620) may be minimized. Kiosks (figure 11) are also developed which assist customers in the selection of videos, music, books, and the like in accordance with the customer's objective profiles.

System and method for scheduling broadcast of and access to video programs and other data using customer profiles

Communication in highly interactive distributed applications, such as massive multiplayer online games, can often be performed efficiently using multicast, i.e., application level multicast. However, in applications with a very dynamic group management, the multicast tree will have frequent changes, and in applications that have stringent latency requirement, this operation needs to be fast. Current multicast approaches either have no notion of reconfiguration, they do not care about tree reconstruction latency or wrongly assume that this is a fast, atomic operation. In this paper, we have focused on dynamic reconfiguration and have tested different ways for a node to join a tree. Our results show that this is an important issue for the class of highly interactive distributed applications.

Multicast tree reconfiguration in distributed interactive applications

Multiplayer online games are becoming increasingly popular as broadband internet connections replace the old modems. However, while available bandwidth grows steadily according to Moore's law, the latency of the internet connections remains almost constant, making it difficult to maintain a consistent game state over a large number of clients that have to be synchronized with each other and with the server(s). This paper introduces a possible solution to the problem by defining the necessary level of consistency through user's perception of the game. While the resulting set of requirements is somewhat difficult to formalize, it is not too restrictive and leaves many options open, some of which are discussed here. Ideally a game where all the requirements are met will appear like a local game to the user.

Consistency requirements in multiplayer online games

Distributed interactive applications may have stringent latency requirements and dynamic user groups. These applications may benefit from a group communication system, and to improve the system support for such applications, we investigate graph algorithms that construct low-latency overlay networks for application-layer multicast. In particular, we focus on reducing the diameter and the pair-wise latencies in the overlay. The overlay construction time is also considered, as it is often time-dependent in our dynamic target applications. Here, we have implemented and experimentally analyzed spanning-tree heuristics and mesh construction heuristics, and compared their performance and applicability to distributed interactive applications. We found that trees are faster to construct and save considerable amounts of resources in the network. Meshes, on the other hand, yield lower pair-wise latencies and increases the fault tolerance, but at the expense of increased resource consumption.

Constructing low-latency overlay networks: Tree vs. mesh algorithms

Software development tools have not adapted to the growing popularity of  multi-core CPUs, and developers are still "stuck"' with low-level and  high-cost thread abstractions.  The situation is becoming even more  complicated with the advent of heterogenuous computing.  In this article, we  point out some drawbacks of high-level abstractions currently in use, and  propose Kahn process networks (KPN) as a more high-level and efficient  abstraction for developing parallel applications.  We show that the native  POSIX mechanisms (threads and message queues) perform suboptimally as an  implementation vehicle for KPNs, and we present an implementation of a  run-time environment that can execute KPNs with less overhead.  Our  evaluation shows the advantages and disadvantages of statically mapping Kahn  processes to CPUs.

Evaluating the Run-Time Performance of Kahn Process Network Implementation Techniques on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

The challenge of scaling IO performance of multimedia systems to demands of their users has attracted much research. A lot of effort has gone into development of distributed systems that add little latency and computing overhead. For machines in PCI Express (PCIe) clusters, we propose Device Lending as a novel solution which works at a system level.Device Lending achieves low latency and extremely low computing overhead without requiring any application-specific distribution mechanisms. For applications, the remote IO resource appears local. In fact, even the drivers of the operating system remain unaware that hardware resources are located in remote machines.By enabling machines in a PCIe cluster to lend a wide variety of hardware, cluster machines can get temporary access to a pool of IO resources. Network cards, FPGAs, SSDs, and even GPUs can easily be shared among computers. Our proposed solution, Device Lending, works transparently without requiring any modifications to drivers, operating systems or software applications.

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Carsten Griwodz

Papers

Multicast tree reconfiguration in distributed interactive applications

Consistency requirements in multiplayer online games

Constructing low-latency overlay networks: Tree vs. mesh algorithms

Evaluating the Run-Time Performance of Kahn Process Network Implementation Techniques on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

Device lending in PCI express networks