Alfred Kobsa

Liliana Ardissono

Mark T. Maybury

TV viewers today are exposed to overwhelming amounts of information, and challenged by the plethora of interactive functionality provided by current set-top boxes. To ensure broad adoption of this technology by consumers, future Digital Television will have to take usability issues thoroughly into account. In particular, serious attention must be paid to facilitate the selection of content on an individual basis, and to provide easy-to-use interfaces that satisfy viewers' interaction requirements. This volume collects selected research reports on the development of personalized services for Interactive TV. Drawing upon contributions from academia and industry in the US, Europe and Asia, this book represents a comprehensive picture of leading edge research in personalized television.

Targeting Programs to Individual Viewers

Personalized Digital Television

Gerald J. Kowalski

Chapter 1 places into perspective a total Information Storage and Retrieval System. This perspective introduces new challenges to the problems that need to be theoretically addressed and commercially implemented. Ten years ago commercial implementation of the algorithms being developed was not realistic, allowing theoreticians to limit their focus to very specific areas. Bounding a problem is still essential in deriving theoretical results. But the commercialization and insertion of this technology into systems like the Internet that are widely being used changes the way problems are bounded. From a theoretical perspective, efficient scalability of algorithms to systems with gigabytes and terabytes of data, operating with minimal user search statement information, and making maximum use of all functional aspects of an information system need to be considered. The dissemination systems using persistent indexes or mail files to modify ranking algorithms and combining the search of structured information fields and free text into a consolidated weighted output are examples of potential new areas of investigation. The best way for the theoretician or the commercial developer to understand the importance of problems to be solved is to place them in the context of a total vision of a complete system. Understanding the differences between Digital Libraries and Information Retrieval Systems will add an additional dimension to the potential future development of systems. The collaborative aspects of digital libraries can be viewed as a new source of information that dynamically could interact with information retrieval techniques.

Theory and Implementation

Information Storage and Retrieval Systems

The advent of increasingly large consumer collections of audio(e.g., iTunes), imagery (e.g., Flickr), and video (e.g., YouTube)is driving a need not only for multimedia retrieval but alsoinformation extraction from and across media. Furthermore,industrial and government collections fuel requirements for stockmedia access, media preservation, broadcast news retrieval,identity management, and video surveillance. Whilesignificant advances have been made in language processing forinformation extraction from unstructured multilingual text andextraction of objects from imagery and video, these advances havebeen explored in largely independent research communities who haveaddressed extracting information from single media (e.g., text,imagery, audio). And yet users need to search for conceptsacross individual media, author multimedia artifacts, and performmultimedia analysis in many domains. This collection is intended to serve several purposes, includingreporting the current state of the art, stimulating novel research,and encouraging cross-fertilization of distinct researchdisciplines. The collection and integration of a common base ofintellectual material will provide an invaluable service from whichto teach a future generation of cross disciplinary media scientistsand engineers.

Mark T. Maybury

About

Books

Join the club