Incorporating domain knowledge with video and voice data analysis in news broadcasts

This paper addresses the area of video annotation, indexing and retrieval, and shows how a set of tools can be employed, along with domain knowledge, to detect narrative structure in broadcast news. The initial structure is detected using low-level audio visual processing in conjunction with domain knowledge. Higher level processing may then utilize the initial structure detected to direct processing to improve and extend the initial classification.

The structure detected breaks a news broadcast into segments, each of which contains a single topic of discussion. Further the segments are labeled as a) anchor person or reporter, b) footage with a voice over or c) sound bite. This labeling may be used to provide a summary, for example by presenting a thumbnail for each reporter present in a section of the video. The inclusion of domain knowledge in computation allows more directed application of high level processing, giving much greater efficiency of effort expended. This allows valid deductions to be made about structure and semantics of the contents of a news video stream, as demonstrated by our experiments on CNN news broadcasts.

Rote movie

"On the voice over de Bruyn places himself behind the wheel of a car, an appropriate metaphor for his expatriate driven reflections on his feelings of exile, distance and loneliness. Necessarily unintelligent memories highlight habitual subjectivity of "walking through a landscape alone", "gypsy", "victim". Images of roadsigns, cars, billboards, the passing landscape; elegantly simple rotoscope (by rote?) drawings, recopied and texturally manipulated filmic images; the inevitability of the repetition of leader. A tired, yearning, moving film." http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/debruyn_films.html

Web 2.0 : an argument against convergence

Web 2.0 has been a dominant concept in recent discussion and development of Internet applications, businesses and uses. Dating from 2004, the term Web 2.0 is variously understood as new forms of website development and delivery technology, changing uses of the Internet to emphasise sociability over consumption, new understandings of the possible financial exploitation of the web, and more broadly, a new way of thinking about the Internet as a whole. However, Web 2.0 is, conceptually, both more and less than these various understandings and we can only grasp why it has become such a key term in contemporary usage by appreciating two key discursive foundations for this term. Firstly, much Web 2.0 thinking is a re-expression of long-held ideas about the Internet and the web. Secondly, at the particular time when Web 2.0 was made popular, net technology policy makers and financial analysts were primarily enthused by the possibilities of broadband networks for improved and more profitable versions of the well-established businesses of telephony and audio-visual entertainment, and had to some extent consigned novel, web-based services to a lesser role, following the dot.com crash. Thus, as I argue in this paper, Web 2.0 can be understood as a key intervention, from within the dot.com / new media business sector, recovering from the crash, that re-asserts the equal legitimacy of the use of networked computing, over high-speed lines, for computing-oriented activities, and not just video on demand and voice over IP. In short, in the first years of this century, discussions about the future of the Internet had become dominated by arguments for increased broadband access, substantially concerned with providing more traditional video and voice services in new ways. The World Wide Web was seen as relatively unimportant for this purpose, even though it was part of the so-called 'triple play' of voice and data services. At this time, first in the hands of Tim O'Reilly and then from others who took up his position, Web 2.0 became a catchy simple term under which to mount a campaign for the renaissance of the World Wide Web as a quite distinct, yet equally important, form of media and communications. So, Web 2.0 provides evidence that, while there is a convergence of all forms of media and communications towards similar data traffic over the Internet, there remain diverging views over the nature, control and use of the Internet, views that express the degree to which corporate players imagine themselves to be 'media', 'telephony' or 'computing' in primary orientation.

‘My school has been quite pushy about the Oxbridge thing’ : voice and choice of higher education

Whilst government policies are now pushing teachers to listen to pupils, this concern is largely framed within the school improvement agenda. This is not the only arena where listening to pupils counts. This article examines the ways in which two young people, making a significant choice about which university to attend, felt unable to discuss their interests and concerns with their teachers. In one case, this resulted in a young woman doing less well in her examinations in order to avoid getting her first preference of Oxbridge, and securing her ‘real choice’ at another Russell Group university. The other was not invited by his school to apply to Oxbridge, despite a desire to go there which he felt unable to articulate at school. We suggest that, given the current concern over widening participation, these two cases provide hints that all is not well with school gate-keeping and career guidance procedures.

Voice art

This study investigated people's ability to control changes in voice volume in order to create digital art. The results demonstrated that with practice, people without previous vocal training are able to improve control over their voice volume. However, it is not sufficient to create art.