There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Home PURPOSE OF THE CENTER: To develop the center to address state-of-the-art research, create innovating educational programs, and support technology transfers using commercially viable results to assist the Army Research Laboratory to develop the next generation Future Combat System in the telecommunications sector that assures prevention of perceived threats, and Non Line of Sight/Beyond Line of Sight lethal support.

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Digital processing of speech signals

This survey describes the current state-of-the-art in the development of automated visual surveillance systems so as to provide researchers in the field with a summary of progress achieved to date and to identify areas where further research is needed. The ability to recognise objects and humans, to describe their actions and interactions from information acquired by sensors is essential for automated visual surveillance. The increasing need for intelligent visual surveillance in commercial, law enforcement and military applications makes automated visual surveillance systems one of the main current application domains in computer vision. The emphasis of this review is on discussion of the creation of intelligent distributed automated surveillance systems. The survey concludes with a discussion of possible future directions.

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Intelligent distributed surveillance systems: a review

VSUMM: A mechanism designed to produce static video summaries and a novel evaluation method

Media streaming applications are becoming very popular in the Internet world. Since they mainly rely on a not scalable client/server model, the P2P model is receiving more and more attention as a system to provide media streaming. Different P2P media streaming systems are available, but today the most successful approach seems the chunk-driven P2P model. In such system, the basic assumption is that the media file is divided into several chunks/segments and while playing a segment, the client downloads the following one(s). However, since P2P networks offer no guarantees to the supported applications, inter-segments playout interruption might disruptively affect the perceived playout quality. To mitigate this, we propose a novel approach that uses both low-level audio and video information to divide the video in stand-alone segments. Using real P2P bandwidth aggregate data traffic and a trace-driven simulation, an objective and a subjective evaluation show that if the underlying P2P network causes inter-segments playout delay, the perceived playout quality is less affected if our approach is employed.

On Ameliorating the Perceived Playout Quality in Chunk-Driven P2P Media Streaming Systems

Multimedia applications require the transmission of real-time streams over a network. These streams often exhibit variable bandwidth requirements, and require high bandwidth and guarantees from the network. This creates problems when such streams are delivered over the Internet. To solve these problems, recently, a small set of differentiated services has been introduced. Among these, Premium Service is suitable for real-time transmissions. It uses a bandwidth allocation mechanism (BAM) based on the traffic peak rate. Since the bandwidth requirement of a video stream can be quite variable, this can result in a high cost to the user and an inefficient use of network bandwidth. In this paper we introduce a BAM that can increase bandwidth utilization and decrease the allocated bandwidth without affecting the QoS of the delivered real-time stream and without introducing any modification in the Premium Service. We also introduce several frame dropping mechanisms that further reduce bandwidth consumption subject to a QoS constraint when coupled with the above BAM. The proposed BAM and the heuristics algorithms are evaluated using Motion JPEG and MPEG videos and are shown to be effective in reducing bandwidth requirements.

/pdf/real-time-traffic-transmission-over-the-internet-3nhim116r6.pdf

Real-Time Traffic Transmission over the Internet

More and more people watch TV with a second device in the nearby. They use it for many different reasons: to play, to search for something, to interact with other people, etc. As a result, their visual attention is often turned to the second screen, especially during commercials. This scenario scares broadcasters, as they fear losing the advertisers' investment. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the engagement between viewers and commercials. Both broadcasters and advertisers are trying to identify the right approach, but an effective solution has yet to be found. In this paper, we propose to use the gamification approach to increase the engagement between viewers and commercials. Our idea is to modify the visual layout of commercial breaks by introducing game elements (i.e., a quiz with simple questions related to some selected commercials). Through an experimental assessment, we evaluated the effectiveness of our proposal and the results show that not only the viewers enjoyed playing the quiz-based game, but also show that the engagement between viewers and commercials improved considerably (i.e., from 30% to 70%).

TV commercials: Improving viewers engagement through gamification and second screen

Although the audiobook market is growing at an exceptional speed, an audiobook is limited to passive listeners. In this paper we propose a novel approach to transform a passive listener into a story director. By introducing interactivity into digital audiobook, a user can interact with the storyline and the story develops according to user choices. We propose an architecture that produces interactive audiobooks in a transparent and secure way. Transparency is achieved by using the AAC format for the audio stream, the MPEG7-DDL for the audio description and the ISO Base Media File Format for the audiobook file format; security is achieved with a mechanism that protects the digital content from illegal usage and avoids any possible content malicious alteration. The simplicity of our approach, along with the growing usage of portable devices, may find new markets for the audiobook in the educational and entertainment worlds.

Beyond Passive Audiobook: How Digital Audiobooks Get Interactive

Museums are embracing social technologies in an attempt to broaden their audience and to engage people. Although social communication seems an easy task, media managers know how hard it is to reach millions of people with a simple message. Indeed, millions of posts are competing every day to get visibility in terms of likes and shares and very little research focused on museums communication to identify best practices. In this article, we focus on Twitter and we propose a novel method that exploits interpretable machine learning techniques to: (a) predict whether a tweet will likely be appreciated by Twitter users or not; (b) present simple suggestions that will help to enhance the message and increase the probability of its success. Using a real-world dataset of around 40,000 tweets written by 23 world famous museums, we show that our proposed method allows identifying tweet features that are more likely to influence the tweet success.

Marco Furini

Papers

On Ameliorating the Perceived Playout Quality in Chunk-Driven P2P Media Streaming Systems

Real-Time Traffic Transmission over the Internet

TV commercials: Improving viewers engagement through gamification and second screen

Beyond Passive Audiobook: How Digital Audiobooks Get Interactive

A Predictive Method to Improve the Effectiveness of Twitter Communication in a Cultural Heritage Scenario