KMi Seminars
New Paradigms in Multimedia Management and Access
This event took place on Tuesday 13 December 2005 at 12:30

 
Prof. Stefan Rueger KMi, The Open University, United Kingdom

Digital Multimedia objects, in libraries or otherwise, hold the promise of being able to be indexed by their contents just as other documents can be indexed and searched by their full text. This talk presents new paradigms for digital knowledge management that were developed in my lab; they include

- novel browsing methods that utilise an automated structuring of the digital collection as a small-world graph with a low degree of separation

- content-based multimedia retrieval, eg, search of still images similar to given ones; finding a news story broadcast over TV by providing visual examples; finding a music piece by humming it etc. Our approach for finding material is not based on manual annotation but on /automated/ processing.

- clustering and visualisation techniques to present material in a collection or organise large document sets that were returned in a query.

Some of the challenges in this approach are given by the semantic gap between what computers can index and high-level human concepts and by polysemy, ie, the many meanings and interpretations that are inherent in visual material and the corresponding wide range of information need by the user. We try to overcome these challenges by utilising the skills of the user, for example through a process that we call relevance feedback, thus putting the user at centre stage. Behind the scene, we deploy learning algorithms that adapt themselves to the user and their information need.

We argue that these methods, when integrated into digital libraries, will not only enhance their searching and browsing capabilities but also give access through unconventional query methods such as sketching, similarity browsing and providing examples of what is relevant.

Download PowerPoint presentation (10.4Mb ZIP file)

 
KMi Seminars
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.