5238518
Evolving video skims into useful multimedia abstractions
This paper reports two studies that measured the effects of different “video skim” techniques on comprehension, navigation, and user satisfaction. Video skims are compact, content-rich abstractions of longer videos, condensations that preserve frame rate while greatly reducing viewing time. Their characteristics depend on the image- and audio-processing techniques used to create them. Results from the initial study helped refine video skims, which were then reassessed in the second experiment. Significant benefits were found for skims built from audio sequences meeting certain criteria.
52819119
Video skimming and characterization through the combination of image and language understanding
Digital video is rapidly becoming important for education, entertainment and a host of multimedia applications. With the size of the video collections growing to thousands of hours, technology is needed to effectively browse segments in a short time without losing the content of the video. We propose a method to extract the significant audio and video information and create a skim video which represents a very short synopsis of the original. The goal of this work is to show the utility of integrating language and image understanding techniques for video skimming by extraction of significant information, such as specific objects, audio keywords and relevant video structure. The resulting skim video is much shorter; where compaction is as high as 20:1, and yet retains the essential content of the original segment. We have conducted a user-study to test the content summarization and effectiveness of the skim as a browsing tool.
7755497
Teaching Java Concurrency to CS vs IT Students: A Matter of Emphasis
A number of colleges and universities have recently added new degree programs in Information Technology (IT), or added IT components to existing Computer Science (CS) programs. Java language and technology are almost inescapable elements of both CS and IT programs. One of Java's more advanced features, languagelevel support for concurrency in the form of explicit multithreading, is important to both CS and IT students, but for different reasons. Teaching Java concurrency to CS and IT students, therefore, presents different challenges and requires emphasizing the topic in different ways. We discuss these issues, and present our experiences from CS and IT classes taught recently, in which Java concurrency was a topic.
840524
Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: visualizing the activity of individuals in conversational cyberspaces
We discuss the design, implementation and evaluation of two related visualizations of authors' activities in Usenet newsgroups. Current Usenet news browsers focus on messages and thread structures while disregarding valuable information about the authors of messages and the participants of the various discussions. Newsgroup Crowds graphically represents the population of authors in a particular newsgroup. Authors are displayed according to the number of messages they contribute to each thread and the number of different days they appear in the space, illustrating and contrasting the interaction patterns of participants within the newsgroup. AuthorLines visualizes a particular author's posting activity across all newsgroups over a period of one year. This visualization reveals temporal patterns of thread initiation and reply that can broadly characterize the roles authors play in Usenet. We report the results of a user study that explored the value of these interfaces for developing high-level awareness of the activity and population in these conversational spaces. We suggest that interfaces that convey information about the social histories of populations and individuals may support better selection and evaluation of newsgroup content.
15484498
The Social Network and Relationship Finder: Social Sorting for Email Triage
Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better support email triage by providing users with additional sorting features based on socially salient information. We present a prototype email client, SNARF (the Social Network and Relationship Finder), that aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents to aid email triage. Users can then sort their correspondents based on this meta-data, bringing emails from socially important people to the foreground.
7589048
Security considerations when designing a distributed file system using object storage devices
We present the design goals that led us to developing a distributed object-based secure file system, Brave. Brave uses mutually authenticated object storage devices, SCARED, to store file system data. Rather than require a new authentication infrastructure. we show how we use a simple authentication protocol that is bridged into existing security infrastructures, even if there is more than one authentication protocol or domain present. We position our work in the context of some of the current work going on in distributed secure file systems and present our implementation of our file system. We also present some security weaknesses that are shared with other distributed file systems that may not be apparent when designing these systems.
10633849
Assessing differential usage of usenet social accounting meta-data
We describe a usage study of NetscanTech, a system that generates and publishes daily a range of social metrics across three dimensions: newsgroup, author, and thread, for a set of approximately 15,000 technical newsgroups in Usenet. We bring together three interlinked datasets: survey data, usage log data and social accounting data from Usenet participation, to triangulate the relationship between various user roles and differential usage of social metrics in NetscanTech. We found our most frequent users focused on information related to individual authors far more than any other information provided. In contrast, users that visited less frequently focused more on information related to newsgroups and viewing newsgroup metrics. Our results suggest features that designers and developers of online communities may wish to include in their interfaces to support the cultivation of different community roles.