Winter School Video Lectures now available

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Firstly, an acknowledgement that we successfully held our Winter School on Multimedia Processing and Applications at the beginning of this year co-located with the MMM2014 conference in Dublin. 30 international attendees, mostly PhDs and young researchers, were present for a set of technology centred presentations by MediaMixer experts and industry centred presentations by research project leaders in areas such as broadcasting, digital preservation and the Internet of Things.

The student Siriwat Kasamwattanarote from the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan won the school Best Poster award for work done on “Tell me about TV commercials of this product”.

The Winter School talks covered the latest technological developments in the area of multimedia processing (media analysis, media annotation, media rights management) and of emerging multimedia applications (in the Sensor Web, audiovisual archives, TV broadcasting, digital preservation and e-learning domains). We didn’t want to keep this purely for the 30 attending students, so now all of the talks are published online courtesy of VideoLectures.NET:

MediaMixer demos at Online Educa this week

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MediaMixer partner JSI will present the project demos on e-learning, news and media rights management this week during a fully booked workshop at Online Educa (Berlin, 4-6 December).

The Wednesday afternoon workshop “Artificial Intelligence Methods for Online-Based Education” has as its aims:

  • To present state-of-the-art machine translation methods and tools
  • To present state-of-the-art user profiling, aggregation and methods and tools
  • To present state-of-the-art cross lingual knowledge technologies
  • To present success stories from similar domains
  • To discuss future directions and potential projects

The participants as an outcome of the workshop will be able to understand how new technologies offer universities and academic communities new solutions to old and familiar problems. Higher education is trying to catch up with the changes of the digital age and the internet, and so the main goal of this half-day event is to clarify how emerging technologies, based on machine learning, machine translation, text mining, semantic web, open access, academic video journals, free video libraries, open lecture capture systems, OER and more, can change and help co-create emerging publishing, curriculum, designation, filtration, validation and research trends in Academia in Europe and in general.

For non-attendees, the demo videos can be seen at http://community.mediamixer.eu/demonstrators

One future of e-learning @ioe2013: mash up learning video for MOOC remixes

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MediaMixer co-ordinator Lyndon Nixon presented at the Internet of Education 2013 conference at Ljubljana, Slovenia (organised by project partner Jozef Stefan Institute) one possible MediaMixer future of e-learning. In this future, learning videos are mashed up to generate new learning offers for online learners, and such re-mixes could be the basis for new MOOC offers that are more flexible and personalised to individual learners. Dr Nixon noted that as e-learning materials become increasingly video, there are new requirements on how to retrieve relevant video by topic and access it in term of its parts (fragments), especially relevant for learners on the go or on mobile devices.

MediaMixer technology is a solution for this, as shown by our use case with VideoLectures.NET, the VideoLecturesMashup. This use case has been described previously, and the video of the demonstrator is also online.

Our slides on MediaMixing for e-learning are available:

Online demonstrator of video shot segmentation and concept detection available

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In the context of the MediaMixer use case on mashing up e-learning video, the technical partner CERTH and the use case partner JSI (for VideoLectures.net) have produced an online demonstration of technology necessary for the first step: creating fragments of the learning video assets and detecting concepts of relevance in those fragments.

Check the demonstrator at http://160.40.50.201/mediamixer/demonstrator.html and give us your feedback and comments on the technology at our forum on fragment creation and description.

*Due to the VideoLectures.NET dataset (lectures) the demo does not express the full potential of the video shot segmentation and concept detection process, but is still a nice example.
Do you have datasets which could be more suitable for creating media fragments with video analysis techniques? Become our community member and get to know MediaMixer technologies!

MediaMixer presented advanced technology for e-learning video at OCWC Global

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With the title “Advanced Methods and Tools for Web-based Education”, this event at the OCWC Global conference brought together students, researchers and other professionals from diverse technological, social and educational backgrounds to understand the ways in which new technologies are shaping the future of education. Organised by FP7 projects such as transLectures, Xlike and Mediamixer,  this one-day event was held immediately prior to the main conference in Bali, Indonesia and was by all means very successful.

The lecture room was completely full hosting 27 attendees from 1) APTIKOM, an association of colleges and universities in Indonesia that offer educational programs in computing, information systems and technology – out of 2,750 higher education institutions in the country, approximately 750 of them are the members of APTIKOM, with a collective student body of 600,000 people – 2) the OpenCourseWare Consortium, 3) the Ministry of Communication and Informatics of Indonesia, and 4) the Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia. The speakers were Marko Grobelnik (JSI), Mitja Jermol (JSI) and Colin de la Higuera (Uni. Nantes).

Since the workshop was directed towards showing the participants an overview of the European state-of-the-art on new-media solutions, the workshop presented 1) short introduction to machine learning, machine translation language technologies, 2) an introduction to advanced large scale data analytics (big data), 3) language-agnostic cross-lingual services, and 4) technologies to monitor and aggregate knowledge that is currently spread across different domain collections, and granular level media fragment re-purposing and re-mixing that may be pertinent to setting up an e-learning or open education project.

Mediamixer fits into this workshop scenario by providing a community that can help these practitioners that are opening up to online educational videos, thereby expanding the consumer base of any given video for sharing and re-purposing. One of the main facilitator being the exponential growth of Internet access in Indonesia with 25% penetration and 80 million users – all high consumers of digital online content,mostly via smart devices. This uptake is also present and visible in the audio-visual market.

The videos, presentations and follow up news to the workshop will be posted on the Knowledge 4 All Foundation Ltd. website (http://www.k4all.org/?q=node/1093) for further consumption.

Solve our Grand Challenge and win a trip to Ljubljana

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MediaMixer is pleased to announce a Call for Multimedia Grand Challenge Solutions: Participate in the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Temporal Segmentation and Annotation Grand Challenge, and win a trip to Ljubljana, Slovenia!

to be held at ACM Multimedia 2013, Barcelona, Spain, October 21-25, 2013

offical Grand Challenge page:
http://acmmm13.org/submissions/call-for-multimedia-grand-challenge-solutions/mediamixervideolectures-net-grand-challenge/

CHALLENGE DESCRIPTION
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VideoLectures.NET mostly hosts lectures 1 to 1.5h long linked with slides and enriched with metadata and additional textual contents. With automatic temporal segmentation and annotation of the video we would gain on efficiency of our video search engine and be able to provide users with the ability to search for sections within a video, as well as recommend similar content. This would mean that the challenge participants develop tools for automatic segmentation of videos that could then be implemented in VideoLectures.NET.

The criteria for the evaluation of the proposed solutions to this challenge include the quality of the segmentation and the annotations, the duration of the required processing in time, and the ease of integration of the proposed solutions into VideoLectures.NET.

A dataset of Videos from VideoLectures.NET will be provided. Participants are also free to use additional datasets for testing their approaches, in addition to the videos provided by the Challenge organizers.

SUBMISSIONS AND PUBLICATION OF RESULTS
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Submissions should depict working, presentable systems or demos, using the provided grand challenge dataset, and should describe why the system presents a novel and interesting solution.

The submissions (max 4 pages) should be formatted according to ACM Multimedia formatting guidelines. Multimedia Grand Challenge reviewing is Double-blind so authors shouldn’t reveal their identity in the paper. The finalists will be selected by a committee consisting of academia and industry representatives, based on novelty, presentation, scientific interest of the approach and performance against the task.

Finalist submissions will be published in the conference proceedings, and will be presented in a special event during the ACM Multimedia 2013 conference in Barcelona, Spain. At the conference, finalists will be requested to introduce their solutions, give a quick demo, and take questions from the judges and the audience. Winners will be selected for Multimedia Grand Challenge awards based on their presentation. An additional prize (sponsored by Technicolor) will be awarded to the most innovative multimodal solution, and a special MediaMixer prize will be awarded to the best solution presented for the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Challenge.

IMPORTANT DATES
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Challenge Dataset: Already available!
Paper Submission Deadline: July 1, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: July 29, 2013
Camera-Ready Submission Deadline: August 12, 2013

SUBMIT AND WIN A TRIP TO LJUBLJANA
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MediaMixer is pleased to sponsor a prize for the Grand Challenge. The best solution – as determined by the evaluation criteria and subject to final decision by the challenge organizers – wins the submitting author(s) a trip to beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia!

The winners are invited to visit the offices of VideoLecture.NET, meet the team over lunch and discuss how their solution may be integrated into the next release of the video portal. The rest of their stay they are free to explore Slovenia’s capital city.

The prize is reimbursement of flight and hotel costs for up to *2* persons (at least one of whom MUST be a named author of the winning paper) to Ljubljana, Slovenia. The flight taken must be in economy class and the hotel stay no more than 2 nights, and a maximum reimbursement amount of 1000€ can be claimed, subject to the provision of original receipts.

INTERESTED?
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The first step is to contact us, we will answer any questions you have and most importantly we can give you access to the MediaMixer/VideoLectures.NET Challenge dataset.
Tanja Zdolsek, tanja.zdolsek AT ijs.si
Vasileios Mezaris, bmezaris AT iti.gr

Learn advanced methods and tools for Web-based education at OCWC Global 2013

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MediaMixer partner JSI is pleased to announce a special workshop on “Advanced Methods and Tools for Web-based Education” one day before the main OCWC Global Conference 2013. OCWC – the Open CourseWare Consortium – is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide. The workshop will permit conference attendees to learn about, among others, technologies for granular level media fragment re-purposing and re-mixing that may be pertinent to setting up an e-learning or open education project.