Interactive Multimedia Communications Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue on 6G Enabled Interactive Multimedia Communication Systems

No abstract available.

Propuesta metodológica para el uso de las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones en la enseñanza del periodismo hipermedia

Las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones (TICs) constituyen una importante herramienta de trabajo para la investigación y la planificación en el campo del periodismo y la comunicación. El nuevo contexto en que Cuba se desenvuelve exige la creación de condiciones para ofrecerle a la sociedad profesionales del periodismo capaces de usar las tecnologías, insertarse activamente en los entornos mediáticos y gestionar proyectos para la transformación social. En el Departamento de Periodismo y Comunicación Social de la Universidad de Camagüey Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz se articulan estrategias en aras de la formación integral de los estudiantes. Desde la Disciplina Comunicación Hipermedia, Tecnología y Sociedad, se desarrollan ejercicios integradores que coadyuvan a la práctica periodística de los futuros profesionales. El objetivo del presente trabajo es argumentar una Propuesta metodológica para la enseñanza del Periodismo Hipermedia, utilizando los blogs como parte de las TICs. Todo esto está en consonancia con el plan de Estudios E que se implementa en la Carrera desde el año 2017.

Redes sociales: Recursos interactivos y la información sobre salud

Dentro del ámbito sanitario, la evolución de la Web 2.0 también se ha hecho patente, y con el paso de los años se observa un cambio hacia una sociedad cada vez más informada sobre salud en Internet, hasta el punto de adoptar nuevos términos para nuestro vocabulario como el de eSalud. La llegada de las redes sociales (RR. SS.) digitales -consideradas el principal estandarte de este nuevo entorno digital- supuso una nueva vuelta de tuerca en la evolución de la comunicación hipermedia y en los modelos de comunicación tradicionales.Las RR. SS. y la salud han establecido una fuerte relación. Y, es que no hay duda de que los social media están afectando a la forma en la que las personas, de los países con índices de desarrollo humano más altos, gestionan su salud. En el ámbito poblacional, el análisis de patrones y tendencias de las búsquedas en plataformas digitales pueden proporcionar información valiosa sobre el comportamiento relacionado con la salud de las poblaciones.En la atención domiciliaria paciente y familia pasan de espectadores a protagonistas, asumen una posición más activa tanto en la comunicación como en la toma de decisiones. Se podría pensar que las RR. SS. son dominio exclusivo de la generación más joven. Sin embargo, muchos son los adultos, incluso de edad avanzada, que las han adoptado con entusiasmo para mantenerse al día, así como para relacionarse con sus conocidos y familiares.Como ya se ha estudiado, las RR. SS. han demostrado su potencial en la provisión remota de supervisión clínica. No obstante, es importante prestar especial atención a tres importantes circunstancias: la proporción del adecuado aprendizaje, el adecuado proceso de uso y su supervisión.Se puede concluir que en “situaciones ideales” las RR. SS. presentan beneficios para todas las partes implicadas en el cuidado domiciliario de la salud.

Popular Science Discourse Development in the Cyberspace

Popular science sphere of communication is acquiring new features of virtuality, globality, mosaic structure and social orientation, which are essential in fulfilling its functions in modern society. Based on the examination of 92 podcasts, the study deals with podcasting research identifying typical characteristics of the podcast and factors contributing to the spread of podcasting in the popular scientific hypermedia communication. The survey showed that increasing popularity of the podcast in the popular scientific sphere is explained by several factors. First, informing the user becomes more accessible, quicker and easier. Secondly, the listener takes part in interpersonal communication not with a virtual author, but with a real person, gets the opportunity to make his own conclusions based on sounding speech, which is more expressive, emotional, and has a strong impact on the addressee. Thirdly, most podcasts are interviews and discussions, which facilitates the perception and processing of new information making it more structured by means of questions, paraphrasing, exemplification, clarifications, etc. Analysis of the Nature publication podcast helped single out structural features that allow a podcast to function in a hypermedia environment as an independent multimodal node. The conclusions about the emergence of new virtual environment for intercultural interaction and cooperation were made.

Using self-regulation to increase resilience in overlay networks for interactive multimedia communications

Overlay networks are the underlying mechanisms which enable multipoint communications in interactive multimedia platforms. They must cope with constraints on heterogeneity, scalability and availability, making their management complex. Thus, several issues might affect the resilience of overlay networks, threatening ongoing communications. Overlay networks usually use self-organization and self-stabilization techniques to improve resilience. Techniques implementing other self-management properties such as self-regulation may also improve the resilience of the overlay. In this paper, the resilience of a reflector-based overlay network is improved with a self-regulation scheme based on audio transcoding and audio mixing. This scheme balances the workloads of the reflectors and saves network resources. As a result, the overlay is more resilient to failures in the reflectors. Extensive simulations have been carried out to compare various transcoding and mixing approaches, proving that self-regulation improves the resilience of the overlay network with little impact on end-to-end latency.

“WhatsApp, Teacher?” - Student Perspectives on Teacher-Student WhatsApp Interactions in Secondary Schools

Aim/Purpose: In this paper, we analyze the phenomenon of “classroom WhatsApp groups”, in which a teacher and students from a particular classroom interact with one another, while specifically focusing on the student perspective of these interactions. Background: The instant messaging application WhatsApp enables quick, interactive multimedia communication in closed groups, as well as one-on-one interactions between selected group members. Yet, very little is known about the extent, nature, and purposes of these practices, the limitations and affordances, the type of discourse and conflicts that develop in these spaces, and the extent to which it affects teacher-student interactions outside of WhatsApp (e.g., the social climate in class, the teacher’s status, teacher-student and student-student relations), especially from the students’ perspective. Methodology: Our methodology combines questionnaires, personal interviews, and focus groups with Israeli secondary school students (N = 88). Contribution: The present study adds to the expanding body of empirical research on social media use in educational settings by specifically focusing on a heretofore underexposed aspect, namely, secondary school student-teacher communication in the popular instant messaging application WhatsApp. We report on findings from the student perspective and discuss the advantages and limitations of this form of communication sphere, and on the social functions of the different classroom WhatsApp groups in secondary school students’ everyday life. Findings: The combined findings reveal that classroom WhatsApp groups have become a central channel of communication for school-related topics. It is used primarily for organizational purposes (sending and receiving updates and managing learning activities), as well as a means for teachers to enforce discipline. Students mentioned many advantages of WhatsApp communication, such as easy access, the ability to create communities, the ability to safeguard personal privacy, and the communication format (written, mediated, personal, or group). However, they also recognized limitations (i.e., communication overload) and challenged teacher ability to monitor and affect student interactions in social media, even when they are present in these WhatsApp classroom groups. Finally, we report on the role of parallel, sans-teacher WhatsApp groups, which are characterized as back stage discourse arenas that accompany the front stage offline classroom activities and the “official” classroom WhatsApp group. Recommendations for Practitioners: The combined findings of this study indicate how WhatsApp-based, joint teacher-student groups can serve a variety of educational purposes, namely, organizational, instructional, and educational-disciplinary. In addition, and in spite of teachers concerns, students are aware of the challenges inherent to the use of WhatsApp for communication with their teachers. Some of the main characteristics that prevent teachers from using other ubiquitous digital communication media, such as Facebook or Twitter, are not relevant when it comes to WhatsApp. Both teachers and students view WhatsApp as a favored channel of communication because of the low exposure to personal information and minimal invasion of privacy. Future Research: The qualitative methodology of this paper limits the ability to generalize the current findings to other contexts and population groups. Future research should preferably explore the generalizability of our findings to larger sections of teenage populations. It should also explore similarities and differences with other age groups. Finally, the present study was set in a particular country (Israel). Local norms of cellphone use and of appropriate teacher-student interaction, as well as locally developed media domestication patterns, may differ from country to country and/or from one cultural group to another. Future research should then include and compare the current findings with data from different countries and cultures in order to complete the picture.

‘Time flies in California’: multiliteracies bridging local diversity and global connectedness through a Reggio-inspired approach

A pedagogy of multiliteracies is based on the theoretical perspective that in order to find our way around our mass media, multimedia and electronic hypermedia communication environments and accommodate the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness, a broadened definition of literacy is required. New ways of making sense of a diverse world now challenge teachers to reflect critically on how old patterns of teaching literacy can be transformed to provide culturally relevant learning experiences. This research project, documented in a Western Australian independent school over a nine-month period, reports an ethnographic case study of how one teacher facilitated children’s multiliteracies learning to bridge local diversity and global connectedness in an early childhood classroom through a Reggio-inspired approach. Implications for educational evaluation and research are that a pedagogy of multiliteracies, when combined with the Reggio Emilia educational philosophy, can optimise children’s achievement of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia outcomes.

Resilient overlay network for real-time interactive multimedia sessions in corporate networks

Real-time interactive multimedia communications are becoming increasingly useful for education, business, e-commerce and e-government, providing an enriched user experience in teleconferencing, e-meetings, distance training and product demonstrations. Large corporations are usually located at several sites, so real-time multipoint sessions within corporations are especially difficult. IP multicast is available or feasible within each site of an organization. Thus, corporate networks can be considered as various multicast-capable networks interconnected through a wide area network without multicast connectivity. This paper proposes a resilient self-managed overlay network to support real-time multipoint interactive sessions within corporate networks. The proposed overlay takes advantage of the configuration of corporate networks to self-organize and provide an efficient media delivery service, making use of multicast communications wherever available. Various self-healing techniques are implemented allowing for the continuity of ongoing sessions in spite of network disruptions and entity failures. Extensive simulations and tests have been carried out to assess the performance and resilience of the overlay facing several types of disruptions.

Recent Trends in Digital Convergence Information System

Welcome to this special issue of the Wireless Personal Communications journal on recent trends in digital convergence information systems. The main goal behind the initiation of this special issue is to create a timely host be the vehicle for publishing selected research papers from academia and practitioners in different industries on this emerging topic. With the advancements in convergence technology, interactive multimedia communications, context awareness, and the proliferation of low cost compact sensing and computing devices, great attention is being paid to the study, development and deployment of digital convergence information systems in various sectors of the society such as healthcare, e-commerce, critical infrastructures, etc.. In healthcare, digital convergence information systems have the potential for lengthening life expectancy and most importantly improving Quality of Life (QoL). For these reasons and also to reduce healthcare costs (e.g., providing smarter healthcare to the elderly at home in an increasingly aging society), many governments worldwide, working with research centers and the industry, are to promoting the development of test projects for onand off-line digital convergence-based health information systems. The industry has acknowledged their great potentials and is heavily investing in the development not only products that are enabling digital convergence information systems but also in the provisioning of digital convergence services for people as a business [1–3]. This special issue covers some of the hottest topics in digital convergence information systems, including: Personal

Study of Embedded Power Environment Remote Video Monitoring System

A design of embedded remote video monitoring was proposed, which took advantage of MPEG-4 compression standard to achieve low bit rate interactive multimedia communications. Characteristics of the system is that users can cut system’s hardware and software as needed, such as removing the function has nothing to do with monitoring, can resolve hardware conflict and optimize system at any time.

Accurate One-Way Delay Estimation: Limitations and Improvements

The one-way delay (OWD) is a crucial parameter in interactive multimedia communications to assess the end users' perception of quality. Precise OWD measurement is a challenge in asymmetric networks in which endpoints are not coordinated and usually without clock synchronization. A usual method estimates the OWD for two endpoints of a connection as equal to one half of the round-trip time, which is not always accurate in the Internet. Employing a third-party node to increase the number of independent equations helps a least-square-error method to estimate the OWD more accurately. Furthermore, adding a couple of constraints to the variables (i.e., OWDs between three nodes) leads to even more precise results. This paper examines the effect of different types of constraints on the accuracy of the cyclic-path method to improve the OWD estimation. To measure the transmission delay, which has a crucial role in the OWD estimation improvement, a simple accurate method is introduced.

A Survey of Low-power Techniques for Liquid Crystal Display Systems with Light Emitting Diode Backlight Units

As the technology evolves, end-users are stuffed with many kinds of handheld devices along with an enor-mous number of interactive multimedia applications and communication functionalities. These devices con-sume much power, especially for displaying their services or functions. In contrast, the battery, which is the main power supplier for such devices, has a much lower capacity growth compared to the power demands. This gap has inspired many researchers to study low-power display techniques. In the mean time, there came the invention of a light emitting diode (LED) as a new backlight source for a display panel. LEDs have been adopted in the most widely used Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) system. This paper focuses on recent noticeable low-power display techniques based on LCD systems, especially associated with an LED back-light unit as its light source. We categorize these techniques into four groups: 1) low-power techniques with backlight dimming, 2) low-power techniques with dynamic voltage scaling, 3) software-based low-power techniques, and 4) hardware-based low-power techniques, and review the core of each technique briefly. Among many techniques, concurrent brightness and contrast scaling technique in a color sequential LED-backlit display system achieved the largest power saving ratio by up to 90% of the total system power with a small distortion level. As future research, it is one of important methods to combine the pros from each beneficial technique into one synergistically in the aspect of the whole system power.

M3FEC: Joint Multiple Description Coding and Forward Error Correction for Interactive Multimedia in Multiple Path Transmission

The best-effort internet has inherent limitations on the end-to-end performance for interactive multimedia communications. This paper presents a multiple description coding (MDC) and forward error correction (FEC) based multiple path transmission schemes for interactive multimedia (M3FEC), which improves the end users' experience by maximizing a rate-distortion (R-D) based optimization problem. The proposed model considers both the network diversity and the application's stringent requirements, and combines the individual merits of the three promising technologies of multiple path overlay routing, MDC and FEC. Extensive numerical analysis and PlanetLab experiments demonstrate that M3FEC successfully combats packet losses, error propagation, and unpredictable network dynamics. This method also significantly increases distortion for interactive multimedia by over 10 dB than traditional IP-layer single path transmission in poor network environments, and outperforms the performance achieved by using MDC or FEC alone.

M2FEC: An effective FEC based multi-path transmission scheme for interactive multimedia communication

The oncoming prosperity of interactive multimedia application triggers significant challenges to current best-effort Internet due to such application’s stringent delay, loss and bandwidth requirements, and Internet’s unpredictable dynamics. Multi-path transmission and error-resilient coding are two promising approaches to alleviate these problems. This paper attempts to introduce error-resilient coding into multi-path transmission to better trade off between multi-path bandwidth resource consumption and reliable media quality. We propose a model for multi-paths interactive multimedia transmission and develop M2FEC—a FEC based transmission scheme which maximizes the overall quality at the client under various constraints based on the proposed model. Numerical simulation and PlanetLab experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of M2FEC in theory and in empiricism, respectively.

CORS: A cooperative overlay routing service to enhance interactive multimedia communications

As interactive multimedia communications are developing rapidly on the Internet, they present stringent challenges on end-to-end (E2E) performance. On the other hand, however, the Internet’s architecture (IPv4) remains almost the same as it was originally designed for only data transmission purpose, and has experienced big hurdle to actualize QoS universally. This paper designs a cooperatively overlay routing service (CORS) aiming to overcome the performance limit inherent in the Internet’s IP-layer routing service. The key idea of CORS is to efficiently compose a number of eligible application-layer paths with suitable relays in the overlay network. Besides the direct IP path, CORS can transfer data simultaneously through one or more application-layer paths to adaptively satisfy the data’s application-specific requirements on E2E performance. Simulation results indicate the proposed schemes are scalable and effective. Practical experiments based on a prototype implemented on PlanetLab show that CORS is feasible to enhance the transmission reliability and the quality of multimedia communications.

No middle ground, but many mansions: design features

In this account a model of communicative functions is used in an attempt to clarify the nature of mixed mode learning delivery. Formulated in research on communication in written mode, the model can be seen to offer insights into the nature of hypermedia communication, as well as helping to identify some key features of effective mixed mode course design. The model also suggests that blended learning should be viewed as a multiplicity of combinations rather than ‘middle ground' in a continuum of wholesale adoption or rejection of ICT. The tentative hypotheses outlined in this paper are illustrated with reference to doctoral research on communication in written mode and reflective monitoring of mixed mode courses run at the Durban University of Technology from 2002–2006.South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 21 (6) 2008: pp. 705-718

Exploring the notion of presence in remocollaborative learning environments

In this paper we discuss issues related to communication and social dynamics characterizing remote collaboration between distant communities. These observations emerge from ethno-graphic researches conducted in collaborative workshop involving MIT -Massachusetts Institute of Technology students with other universities or private companies. The focus of the paper is the notion of presence. This notion is analyzed through three different related aspects: the presence of information, the presence of communication tools and, finally, the presence of people. These analysis give indications on how better design space for learning and remote collaboration using interactive multimedia communication tools.

Performance evaluation of a broadband wireless access system subjected to heavy load

Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems use new network architectures to deliver broadband services in a fixed point-to-point or point-to-multipoint configuration to residential and business customers. These systems support voice, data, video distribution services and emerging interactive multimedia communications. This paper presents a performance evaluation of BWA networks as well as a detailed model, which captures all relevant aspects of such networks in a concise way. This model is evaluated by simulation and compared with the results obtained from measurements on the real system. Simulation results show that this model can be used in an accurate way to characterize base station configuration when it is subjected to heavy data and voice loads.

Motion vector composition algorithm for spatial scalability in compressed video

Spatial scalable encoding of visual data has several applications, including browsing visual databases, querying multimedia databases, interactive multimedia communications, etc. To convert a compressed video sequence to a lower spatial resolution compressed video, it may decode the original bit-stream, down-sample each frame, and encode. The computation-intensive motion estimation will be included in the transcoder. The re-use of motion vectors extracted from incoming video bit-streams during transcoding has been widely accepted. This paper proposes a new algorithm to estimate the motion vector of the reduced low-resolution video by only using the original motion vectors and DC coefficients in the compressed bit-stream. By taking into account the spatial activity measurement to generate better prediction for the composed motion vector, higher quality and lower complexity than previous works are achieved by the proposed method.

TVIS: an interactive multimedia communication engine and its applications

With the rapid progress in computer and communication technologies, it has been the era of interactive distributed applications, e.g., news-on-demand and distant learning. The provision of VCR-like interactive functions, e.g., reverse, skip, freeze–restart, and scale, makes multimedia applications more flexible and useful to users. However, since the media bases are located remotely in a distributed multimedia environment, many issues must be solved to provide smooth interactive multimedia presentations to users. Thus, to facilitate the development of distributed multimedia applications, an interactive communication engine that is capable of handling multimedia communication is required. In this paper, we adopt the master–medium-based control schemes to solve related issues that exist in interactive multimedia presentations. These control schemes can be adopted in the communication engine of a distributed multimedia application for processing reverse, skip, freeze–restart, and scale VCR-like interactive functions. Based on the synchronization control schemes, an interactive multimedia communication engine called the visual interactive system (TVIS) is developed on SUN SPARC workstations. TVIS can be used as the multimedia processing kernel of interactive distributed applications.