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Tech Report kmi-03-14 Abstract


Buddyspace: Large-Scale Presence for Communities at Work and Play
Techreport ID: kmi-03-14
Date: 2003
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou, Martin Dzbor, Jiri Komzak and Marc Eisenstadt
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Presence awareness' of peer-group members can enhance the emotional well-being of isolated learners and create a sense of community, fostering group communication and interaction. This paper presents our research framework in the design of presence-based applications for collaborative, learning and social environments and investigates the design of innovative playful and group learning activities for large numbers of people, based primarily on their mere presence. To promote the deployment of next-generation presence-based tools in distance-learning and social environments, we have implemented and deployed an open-source 'presence environment' called BuddySpace, which integrates Instant Messaging, geo-location services, peripheral presence awareness and presence-enabled multiplayer games.

Publication(s):

Appeared in: The Workshop 'The Role of Online Community Spaces in Shaping Virtual Community Interactions', in the International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2003, September 19-21 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 
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Multimedia and Information Systems is...


Multimedia and Information Systems
Our research is centred around the theme of Multimedia Information Retrieval, ie, Video Search Engines, Image Databases, Spoken Document Retrieval, Music Retrieval, Query Languages and Query Mediation.

We focus on content-based information retrieval over a wide range of data spanning form unstructured text and unlabelled images over spoken documents and music to videos. This encompasses the modelling of human perception of relevance and similarity, the learning from user actions and the up-to-date presentation of information. Currently we are building a research version of an integrated multimedia information retrieval system MIR to be used as a research prototype. We aim for a system that understands the user's information need and successfully links it to the appropriate information sources, be it a report or a TV news clip. This work is guided by the vision that an automated knowledge extraction system ultimately empowers people making efficient use of information sources without the burden of filing data into specialised databases.

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