Mobile Media Workshop

with Prof. Marc Davis, UC Berkeley

23.8.2004 at HIIT

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology's (HIIT) Mobile Content Communities (MC2) project arranged a workshop about mobile media on August 23rd, 2004. The guest for the workshop and the keynote lecturer was professor Marc Davis from UC Berkeley's Garage Cinema Research group. Below is the material presented and generated at the workshop.

Slides

Marko Turpeinen's slides about the workshop, including discussion themes and questions (MS Powerpoint).

Marc Davis' presentation on Mobile Media Metadata (MS Powerpoint)

Group discussion bullets

Loss of contextual data is a common problem. Not limited to media creation.
The importance and use of version or history data.
Amount of required metadata depends on the intended group/audience.
Privacy issues in personal contextual data.
Metadata vs. data traffic.

Charging for content information?
Negative effects of contextual information: privacy and piracy. Should we have "Kodak-free moments" or camera-free zones?
Controlling who sees my media context.
What is the difference between sharing information and copying information?
What will happen to other media recorders if mobile phones take over?

There will be a variety of mobile phones in the future, not one mobile phone that everyone uses.
Freshness of media. How long a piece of media will be interesting?
Ad hoc groups can take advantage of contextual information, but how to manage all the emerging social connections?
What sensors/features should devices have: compass, altitude, alcometer...
The olympic ban on sharing media (see for example here or here)

Latency vs. sporadic
How to achive the critical mass to get the required amount of users for network effects?
Awareness of applications and their usage potential.
Awareness of social networks.
"From IDE to app gap"

Consistency of APIs and media formats.
How do we define different levels of sharing (e.g., open, public)?
Spatial interest groups.
Lower quality of unprofessional media cahnges the concpet of an audience.
Visibility of media / personal information / metadata.

Control over forwarding.
Digital rights expression: "This is how my personal media can be used"
Licensing personal media by default?
Applications: identity management app, P2P communication is traffic, image media in video context.
Intimicy and sharing: how well do people need to know each other before they decide to share media? depends on context and situation.

What real-life events could support mobile media collecting?
Different communication channels have different communication intensities.
Heterogeneity of devices / infrastructure and capabilities of people.
Being "virtually disabled" because of inadequate hardware or poor network connectivity.
Individual collection of media vs. "media asset ecologies".

There is always a cost associated in providing media annotations / ratings / feedback.
When would people prefer to use video with mobile phones? To provide richer sense of "being there", conveying the ambiance, showing things as they are happening, voice annotation on top of video is easy.
Different media types offer very different user experiences.
Adding searchability to all types of media assets becomes more important.

Using audio recordings to understand the context of a picture (30 sec audio before and after). See Frohlich and "Audiophotography".
PictureSpots was interesting as a concept: how much "railroading" people would like to support their media creation, how to make it more subtle (i.e. giving good advice).
Distributed PictureSpot creation, who decides the best places / angles, maybe this could an open system, what is the underlying rich semantic metadata for PictureSpots.
Devices should inculde a digital compass

Related work

R. Sarvas, E. Herrarte, A. Wilhelm, and M. Davis. Metadata Creation System for Mobile Images. MobiSys 2004, Boston, MA, USA. ACM Press.
(PDF)

M.Davis and R. Sarvas. Mobile Media Metadata for Mobile Imaging ICME 2004 Special Session on Mobile Imaging, Taipei, Taiwan, IEEE Computer Society Press, 2004.
(PDF)

R.Sarvas, M.Viikari, J.Pesonen, and H.Nevanlinna. MobShare : Controlled and Immediate Sharing of Mobile Images, Multimedia 2004, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press
(forthcoming 2004).
(PDF)

M.Davis, S. King, N. Good, and R. Sarvas. From Context to Content: Leveraging Context to Infer Media Metadata. Multimedia 2004, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press (forthcoming 2004).

Aware platform by John Evans, Andrew Paterson and Mika Raento, http://aware.uiah.fi/