Media Capture Research Articles

"You Tube and I Find" - Personalizing Multimedia Content Access

Recent growth in broadband access and proliferation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhere - from personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, from creation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itself - its affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today's facility. This integration, transforming the traditional multimedia information retrieval (MIR) indexes to more effectively answer specific user needs, will allow a richer degree of personalization predicated on user intention and mode of interaction, relationship to the producer, content of the media, and their history and lifestyle. In this paper, we identify the challenges in achieving this integration, current approaches to interpreting content creation processes, to user modelling and profiling, and to personalized content selection, and we detail future directions. The structure of the paper is as follows: In Section I, we introduce the problem and present some definitions. In Section II, we present a review of the aspects of personalized content and current approaches for the same. Section III discusses the problem of obtaining metadata that is required for personalized media creation and present eMediate as a case study of an integrated media capture environment. Section IV presents the MAGIC system as a case study of capturing effective descriptive data and putting users first in distributed learning delivery. The aspects of modelling the user are presented as a case study in using user's personality as a way to personalize summaries in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper with a discussion on the emerging challenges and the open problems.

Inequality and media capture

Popular support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects. Mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion, even when voters understand that the media can be biased. I develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost. The model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom; this effect is stronger in democratic regimes. I find empirical support for the model in both panel data and cross-country analysis.

Inequality and Media Capture

People's support of redistributive policies depends on information they have about the tax system and efficiency of public projects. Mass media provides a convenient means for manipulating public opinion, even when voters understand that the media can be biased. I develop a theory of media capture in which the rich can influence information published in a media outlet at a cost. The model shows that higher inequality is associated with lower media freedom; this effect is stronger in democratic regimes. I find empirical support for the model in both panel data and cross-country models.

Media capture in a democracy: The role of wealth concentration

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion. In the case of voting over the level of a productivity-enhancing public bad, it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely. Although media bias is not always welfare worsening, conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive.

Progress in the Capture, Manipulation, and Delivery of Medical Media and Its Impact on Education, Clinical Care, and Research

In this article, advances in the application of medical media to education, clinical care, and research are explored and illustrated with examples, and their future potential is discussed. Impact is framed in terms of the Sloan Consortium's five pillars of quality education: access; student and faculty satisfaction; learning effectiveness; and cost effectiveness. (Hiltz SR, Zhang Y, Turoff M. Studies of effectiveness of learning networks. In Bourne J, Moore J, ed. Elements of Quality Online Education. Needham, MA: Sloan-Consortium, 2002:15-45). The alternatives for converting analog media (text, photos, graphics, sound, video, animations, radiographs) to digital media and direct digital capture are covered, as are options for storing, manipulating, retrieving, and sharing digital collections. Diagnostic imaging is given particular attention, clarifying the difference between computerized radiography and digital radiography and explaining the accepted standard (DICOM) and the advantages of Web PACS. Some novel research applications of medical media are presented.

Media Capture in a Democracy: The Role of Wealth Concentration

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion. In the case of voting over the level of a productivity-enhancing public bad, it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely. Although media bias is not always welfare worsening, conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive.

A phenomenographic study of students' attitudes toward the use of multiple media for learning

Multimedia offer a variety of coding formats for presenting information and this variability is generally valued as a positive characteristic of any multimedia learning environment. This study investigates the idea that students' attitudes concerning the use of multiple media for learning exhibit a considerable variability (different feelings, modes of use, preferences and dislikes) and information about these various stances may help designers and educators to better integrate and use multiple media for educational purposes. Employing a phenomenographic research methodology students' attitudes were recorded, categorised and related to parameters such as their learning styles. Results of the study indicate that a) visual dynamic media (animation and digital movies) capture students' interest and generate subjective feelings of better learning, b) digital movies may enhance the perceived authenticity of the educational setting and this also increases students' interest, c) students transfer to the digital medium the need for learning techniques that they use in the printed medium and experience feelings of restriction if the environment does not adequately support the same techniques or satisfactory alternatives, d) acceptance of audio varies significantly depending on perceptual preferences of students and e) students displaying a high abstract conceptualisation learning style express preference for studying more abstract content using printed matter.

Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? Media Capture and Government Accountability

It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. Even in the absence of censorship, however, the government may influence news content by maintaining a “cozy” relationship with the media. This paper develops a model of democratic politics in which media capture is endogenous. The model offers insights into the features of the media market that determine the ability of the government to exercise such capture and hence to influence political outcomes.

Performance of inter-media synchronization in distributed and heterogeneous multimedia systems

Future multimedia environments are expected to be distributed and heterogeneous. In such environments, media sites ranging from sophisticated workstations to simple media capture and display subsystems such as ISDN videophones and audiophones (together referred to as Mediaphones) that lack the capability to run clock synchronization algorithms will be connected directly to the network. Towards such environments, we develop mechanisms and protocols for synchronous access to multimedia services over integrated networks. In the inter-media synchronization technique we present, for facilitating synchronous retrieval, a multimedia server computes at the time of recording of a multimedia object a range of relative temporal positions or stamps (called an RTS interval) for each media unit that it receives from mediaphones. During playback, the multimedia server detects RTS mismatches between media with the help of feedback messages transmitted back by the mediaphones, and steers the mediaphones back to synchrony. We propose predictive policies for resynchronization and compare their performance for video/audio playback with other resynchronization policies, such as conservative, aggressive, and probabilistic. These performance studies reveal that predictive policies perform uniformly well at all levels of asynchrony, unlike their conservative and aggressive counterparts. Moreover, in most cases, predictive policies match probabilistic policies in effectiveness, without imposing the same computational demands as the probabilistic policies.

Resource capture by interacting fungal colonizers of straw

Nine species of microfungi and eight basidiomycetes were assessed singly and in pairwise or three-way combination for their potential capacity for primary resource capture of agar media, sterile straw and sterile soil. When single species were ranked by extension rate, results on straw and soil agreed broadly with those from agar media, although the rates were much slower in straw. In pairwise and 3-way interactions on sterile soil, colonization proceeded as predicted from the mycelial extension rates of single species on agar, sterile soil and sterile straw, although extension of some species was significantly slower in combination than singly. There was some agreement between the outcome of pairwise interactions observed on 2% malt extract agar medium and sterile soil of four test species, and on straws in non-sterile soil of Agrocybe gibberosa . The four species could be ranked in combative order: A. gibberosa = Sphaerobolus stellatus ≫ Mucor hiemalis and Chaetomium globosum . Cord formation by basidiomycetes was more pronounced in soil than on agar media, and when in close proximity to other species.