Archive for July, 2009

At the INSEMTIVES project meeting, we were happy to welcome Michael Fink from Google Israel. We are now looking forward to his talk on YouTube’s Collaborative Annotations.

Abstract: YouTube’s Collaborative Annotations

More and more YouTube videos no longer provide a passive viewing experience, but rather entice the viewer to interact with
the video by clicking on objects with embedded links. These links are part of YouTube’s Annotations system, which enables content owners to add active overlays on top of their videos. YouTube Annotation overlays also enable adding dynamic speech bubbles and pop-ups which can function as an ever-changing layer of supplementary information and entertainment, augmenting the video experience. This paper addresses the question of whether the ability to add annotation overlays on a given video should be opened to the YouTube public. The basic dilemma in opening a video to collaborative annotations is derived from the tension between the benefits of collaboration and the risks of visual clutter and spam. We term the degree to which a video is open to external contributions as the collaboration spectrum, and describe several models that let content owners to explore this spectrum in order to find the optimal way to harness the power of the masses.

Biographie:

Michael Fink’s work bridges media research, machine learning and cognitive science. Michael initiated the YouTube interactive video annotations project, which in the last year became a major driving force in making YouTube videos truly interactive. Previously, Michael worked at Google Research, focusing on image and audio fingerprinting for applications such as the “mass personalization” of broadcast television. His PhD research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem focuses on large scale object recognition in humans and machines, generating publications ranging from machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to cognitive science, justice and economics. Recently, Michael has initiated an “innovation studies program” in a joint collaboration with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Bezalel Design Academy.

INSEMTIVES plans to collaborate with a number of projects during its lifetime. With that respect, we are currently discussing different collaboration possibilities with the European project KIWI which is set out to realize novel means to support knowledge management using Web2.0 and semantic technologies.

Last week I had the pleasure to introduce our project in the KIWI plenary meeting in Prague and in the same sense to get some insights about current work from the KIWI partners.  It was quite interesting to see their work and especially their use cases. The most interesting use case from my point of view is the Sun use case which has some interesting people and technologies in it.  One very interesting part of their use case is current work by Henry Story on FOAF+SSL and by Peter Reiser and his group on the Community Equity (CE) approach. The goal of CE is to implement a system which determines the social value of people’s contribution with respect to contributed content, skills, or participation. CE is definitely interesting with respect to our incentive research in INSEMTIVES and we will for sure monitor what is going on there.
Furthermore it was nice to see the KIWI platform in action while getting an in-depth introduction to it.

So thanks again to Sebastian for inviting me to their meeting and I am looking forward to welcome him next week in our plenary meeting in Innsbruck!

Tobias