Tutorial Title: Enabling integrated cross-media entertainment services over heterogeneous networks
Instructor: Dr. Kostas Karpouzis
Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens,
E-mail: kkarpou@cs.ntua.gr |
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Instructor: Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou
Democritus University of Thrace
E-mail: tsekerid@ee.duth.gr |
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Description of the tutorial: Digital Content has become a valuable asset nowadays and a variety of novel services in the entertainment sector have emerged to bring new revenue streams to the involved business entities. In the emerging Cross-Media world with a variety of mobile or fixed end-user devices, using diverse transmission channels that require distinct packetization schemes and different per case allowable bandwidth, the core question still stands: How can the same content be transmitted via different channels and consumed at various terminals without costly re-processing and re-production under specific QoS requirements, dictated both by content/service providers and end-users ? Media providers are faced with two choices: either select the most appropriate device for their content and tailor the consumer experience and business models to take advantage of this specific environment, or, alternatively, invest in multiple devices, transmission channels and content formats and free the consumer experience from concerns of appropriate terminals use or specific network access. The aim of this tutorial is to present the methodologies and research initiatives that enable the discovery of efficient solutions for this pressing issue, which are outlined below. It also aims at introducing the interested audience to sample good practices by presenting the results of successful IST R&D projects in the area of cross-media entertainment content and services publishing. In this context, the main target on implementing an integrated service provisioning and cross-media publishing architecture is to enable unified, automatic and transparent access, via specially designed mediation platforms, to distributed content and distinct services through alternative emerging access devices and network infrastructures. To enable unified access i.e., the ability to access any information in real time, over any network, from any device, one aims at developing and demonstrating content and application tailoring engines that will allow e-Business operators to extend their products and services to emerging integrated digital business environments - the emphasis is placed on entertainment broadcasting services. Content adaptation and transcoding modules must be provided for a wide range of devices including set-top boxes, hand-held devices like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), wireless devices, WAP-enabled phones, as well as HDML-based and i-mode phones. The tutorial will cover critical issues, involved in achieving the utmost goal of service integration and cross-media publishing, including:
• Service modeling, profiling and integration
• Hierarchically embedded content and content descriptors for cross-media applications (MPEG?4, MPEG?7)
• Context awareness, content adaptation and transcoding based on environment and user profiles (MPEG?21)
• User profile modeling for interactive, personalized services
• Good practices in multiplatform content publishing and integrated entertainment service provisioning
Biographies: Dr. Kostas Karpouzis received the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1997 and the PhD degree in Computer Science in 2001 both from the Image, Video and Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. While working at the IVML, he has been involved in research activities under many European- and Greek-funded R&D Projects and served as teaching and lab assistant in the Computer Graphics and Digital Image Processing pre-graduate courses, compiling also the textbook for the Computer Graphics course. His main involvement was in the areas of structured audiovisual data modeling and retrieval (projects EPET-II “Panorama” and “Digitization and Archival for the Ministry of Press and Mass Media”) and facial expression synthesis within the MPEG?4 framework (projects PENED “MPEG-4 Authoring Tool for the Composition of 3D Audiovisual Scenes” and IST Ermis “Emotionally-rich Man-Machine Interfaces”). Currently, he is one the core researchers of the Humaine FP6 Network of Excellence on multimodal human-computer interaction and serves as an Associate Researcher for the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS); he also co-operates with Intracom S.A. in the framework of the PiSTE and MELISA projects. His main research interests lie in the areas of image, video and multimedia processing, multimedia content management, virtual and augmented reality, assistive technologies, user profiling and personalization, content adaptation, distance learning and semantic web technologies. He has published ten papers in international scientific journals, more than thirty international conference papers and seven textbooks on applied image processing and CGI. He is a reviewer for many international journals and a member of the ICIP and AIAI Technical committees; he is also a member of the ACM and the Greek Computer Society, where he serves as newsletter co-editor and participates in the Syllabus committee for the Greek EUCIP certification, and a national representative for the IFIP Working Groups 3.2 (Informatics and ICT in Higher Education) and 12.5 (Artificial Intelligence Applications)
Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou received the Diploma of Electrical Engineering in 1996 and the PhD degree in Informatics in 2001 both from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. During her undergraduate studies, she has been a trainee at the University of Saarbruecken , Germany and has taken up part of the organization responsibilities of the 1995 Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing workshop. While pursuing her PhD, she has been involved in research activities under many European funded R&D Projects and has served as teaching assistant in Digital Signal Processing pre-graduate courses. As a PhD candidate, she has been a visiting researcher at Tampere University of Technology, International Center for Digital Signal Processing, Tampere , Finland , where she lectured twice at post-graduate students and researchers on MPEG2 error concealment techniques. During May 2001 - June 2003, she has been employed at the New Technologies Department, INTRACOM S.A., Athens, where she has been involved in project and technical management tasks as well as research activities (mainly focusing on metadata modeling and user profiling) related to FP5 European funded R&D Projects dealing with next generation enhanced and interactive digital TV applications (PiSTE: Personalized Immersive Sports TV Experience , MELISA: Multi-platform e-Publishing for Leisure and Sports Advertising ). Parts of her research work on metadata modeling and user profiling have been reported as contributions to the TV Anytime Standardization Body and to the MPEG ad hoc group on Online Gaming. During the academic year 2002-2003, she served as a temporary Assistant Professor at the Cultural Technology Department, University of the Aegean , lecturing on Informatics courses. At the same time, she undertook teaching assistantship responsibilities at Athens Information Technology Institute (in English) related to the post-graduate course “Information Systems Modeling” and the distance learning course “Digital Signal Processing”. In June 2003, she has been appointed Lecturer at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi , Greece , with area of expertise: “Digital Signal, Image and Multimedia Processing”. Furthermore, during the academic year 2003-2004, she has been appointed as one of the assistant tutors of the pre-graduate course “Telematics, Internet and Society” offered by the Greek Open University. Her research interests lie in the areas of signal, image, video and multimedia processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, multimedia information systems, virtual and augmented reality, watermarking for copyright protection, content-based audio-visual analysis, description and indexing, enhanced and interactive digital TV applications employing MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and MPEG-7/TV Anytime standards, metadata modeling, user profiling and personalization algorithms, content adaptation, context awareness and semantic web technologies. She has published seven papers at international scientific journals, many international conference papers and has contributed to the TV Anytime standardization body and specifically to the Business Models and Metadata working groups as well as recently to the MPEG standardization body. During her undergraduate studies Dr. Tsekeridou received a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Greece. She is a member of IEEE and the Technical Chamber of Greece. |