An Ambient Intelligence Framework for the Provision of Geographically Distributed Multimedia Content to Mobility Impaired Users

Integration of mobile devices in the multimedia delivery systems provides the users (learners or business people) with access to multimedia content outside the classroom (workplace). It allows them to easily store, record and deliver multimedia content in real-time. Process of delivering multimedia content to the users requires more computational resources than mobile device can provide. In order to provide users with multimedia content that is suitable for their mobile devices and according to their needs we introduce the mobile cloud (mCloud) computing environment as paradigm that is ideal to overcome these problems. The proposed interactive mCloud system should provide high scale collaboration and interaction between the users. The system is designed for delivery of multimedia learning content to the users according to the user’s cognitive style. The content is adapted according to the context-aware network conditions. In this paper, we provide some experimental results based on experience of 90 users (students) that participated in the m-learning cooperative process. After completing the course of Database Systems, the users estimated the Quality of Experience (QoE) by using a Learning Scenario Questionnaire.

Energy conservation in battery powered mobile devices that perform wireless multimedia streaming has been a significant research problem since last decade. This is because these mobile devices consume a lot of power while receiving, decoding and ultimately, presenting the multimedia content. What makes things worse is the fact that battery technologies have not evolved enough to keep up with the rapid advancement of mobile devices. This survey examines solutions that have been proposed during the last few years, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless multimedia streaming in mobile hand-held devices. We categorize the research work according to different layers of the Internet protocol stack they utilize. Then, we again regroup these studies based on different traffic scheduling and multimedia content adaptation mechanisms. The traffic scheduling category contains those solutions that optimize the wireless receiving energy without changing the actual multimedia content. The second category on the other hand, specifically modifies the content, in order to reduce the energy consumed by the wireless receiver and to decode and view the content. We compare them and provide evidence of the fact that some of these tactics already exist in modern smaprtphones and provide energy savings with real measurements. In addition, we discuss some relevant literature on the complementary problem of energy-aware multimedia delivery from mobile devices and contrast with our target approaches for multimedia transmission to mobile devices.

Mobile devices are getting increasingly popular all over the world. Mobile users in developing countries however rarely have Internet access which puts them at economic and social disadvantages compared to their counterparts in developed countries. We propose mBridge: A distributed system to disseminate multimedia content to mobile users with intermittent Internet access and opportunistic ad hoc connectivity. By disseminating various multimedia content such as news reports notification messages targeted advertisements movie trailers and TV shows mBridge aims to eliminate the digital divide. We formulate an optimization problem to compute personalized distribution plans for individual mobile users to maximize the overall user experience under various resource constraints. Our formulation jointly considers the characteristics of multimedia content mobile users and intermittent networks. We present an efficient distribution planning algorithm to solve our problem and we develop several online heuristics to adapt to the system and network dynamics. We implement a prototype system and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms by up to 206% 472% and 188% in terms of user experience disk efficiency and energy efficiency respectively. In addition we conduct trace-driven simulations to rigorously evaluate the proposed system in different environments and for large-scale deployments. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms the closest ones in the literature in all performance measures. We believe that mBridge can allow multimedia content providers to reach out to more mobile users and mobile users to access multimedia content without always-on Internet access.

Mobile IP storage has been proposed to overcome storage limitation in the flash memory and hard disks. It provides almost capacity-free space for mobile devices over wireless IP networks. However, battery lifetime of the mobile devices is reduced rapidly because of power consumption with continuous use of a WLAN device when multimedia contents are being streamed through the mobile IP storage. This paper proposes an energy-efficient WLAN device power control technique for streaming multimedia contents with the mobile IP storage. The proposed technique consists of a prefetch buffer input/output module, a WLAN device power control module, and a reconfigurable prefetch buffer module. Besides, it adaptively determines the size of the prefetch buffer according to a quality of the multimedia contents, and it dynamically controls the power mode of the WLAN device on the basis of power on-off operations while streaming the multimedia contents. We evaluate the performance of the proposed technique on a PXA270-based mobile device that employs the embedded linux 2.6.11, Intel iSCSI reference codes, and a WLAN device. Extensive experiments reveal that the proposed technique can save the energy consumption of the WLAN device up to 8.5 times with QVGA multimedia contents, as compared with no power control.Keywords:Wireless LAN, Power Control, Mobile IP Storage

We present a complete system, called Challenged Content Delivery Network (CCDN), to efficiently deliver multimedia content to mobile users who live in developing countries, rural areas, or over-populated cities with no or weak network infrastructure. These mobile users do not have always-on Internet access. We demo our CCDN, implemented on a Linux server, Raspberry Pi proxies, and Android phones from three aspects: multimedia, networking, and machine learning tools. We propose multiple optimization algorithm modules that compute personalized distribution plans, and maximize the overall user experience. CCDN allows people living in area with challenged networks access to multimedia content, like news reports, using mobile devices, such as smartphones. This in turn will help in eliminating the digital divide, which refers to information inequality to persons with different Internet accessing abilities.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, multimedia streaming over wireless networks has increased in popularity. To overcome a number of challenges as well as to enhance mobile users' experience, much research effort has been placed into multimedia content adaptation and personalisation. Supporting adaptive multimedia can pose itself a number of challenges, especially when considering the fast growing rate at which multimedia content is being produced. This paper explores the idea of automatic multimedia content management and authoring to support adaptive multimedia delivery to mobile devices. A multimedia content management tool (MediaMTool) is presented which automatically creates multiple versions of the multimedia clips based on a set of specified multimedia clip features. For testing purposes, MediaMTool was used in conjunction with EcoLearn, a m-learning system that adapts the quality of the educational multimedia clips in order to save battery power on the learner mobile device.

The social relation is a fundamental attribute of human beings in daily life. The ability of humans to form large organizations and institutions stems directly from our complex social networks. Therefore, understanding social relationships in the context of multimedia is crucial for building domain-specific or general artificial intelligence systems. The key to reason social relations lies in understanding the human interactions between individuals through multimodal representations such as action and utterance. However, due to video editing techniques and various narrative sequences in videos, two individuals with social relationships may not appear together in the same frame or clip. Additionally, social relations may manifest in different levels of granularity in video expressions. Previous research has not effectively addressed these challenges. Therefore, this paper proposes a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Multi-Granularity Relation Graph Aggregation Framework</i> (<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MGRG</b>) to enhance the inference ability for social relation reasoning in multimedia content, like video. Different from existing methods, our method considers the paradigm of jointly inferring the relations by constructing a social relation graph. We design a hierarchical multimodal relation graph illustrating the exchange of information between individuals' roles, capturing the complex interactions at multi-levels of granularity from fine to coarse. In MGRG, we propose two aggregation modules to cluster multimodal features in different granularity layer relation graph, considering temporal aspects and importance. Experimental results show that our method generates a logical and coherent social relation graph and improves the performance in accuracy.

Mobile devices have been transformed from voice communication tools to advanced tools for consuming multimedia contents. The extensive use of such mobile devices entails watching multimedia contents on small LCD panels. However, the most of video sequences are captured for normal viewing on standard TV or HDTV, but for cost reasons, merely resized and delivered without additional editing. This may give the small-display-viewers uncomfortable experiences in understanding what is happening in a scene. For instance, in a soccer video sequence taken by a long-shot camera technique, the tiny objects (e.g., soccer ball and players) may not be clearly viewed on the small LCD panel. Thus, an intelligent display technique needs to be developed to provide small-display-viewers with better experience. To this end, one of the key technologies is to determine region of interest (ROI) and display the magnified ROI on the screen, where ROI is a part of the scene that viewers pay more attention to than other regions. In this paper, which is an extension from our prior work, we focus on soccer video display for mobile devices, and a fully automatic and computationally efficient method is proposed. Instead of taking generic approaches utilizing visually salient features, we take domain-specific approach to exploit the attributes of the soccer video. The proposed scheme consists of two stages: shot classification, and ROI determination. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme offers useful tools for intelligent video display for multimedia mobile devices.

An empirical study on user experience evaluation of VR interface in digital museums

OA (Office Automation) is a new type of office which combines the modern office and computer network. In recent years, with the development of cloud computing and smart phones, the cloud OA and mobile OA develops very well. This paper designs a cloud mobile OA system, the OA server is deployed in the cloud, the OA server not only handles the normal OA business processes, but also provides cloud service. We design an Adapter server and deploy it in the cloud, and the Adapter server will not affect the original OA process, only the OA client on the mobile device needs the Adapter server to access to the OA server. According to the user's settings in OA management client, the Adapter server can implement offline, synchronization, push notifications or other functions dynamically to solve the common problems of the traditional mobile OA. The system has the page adaptation function on the mobile device to increase the user's experience. The system streamlines the OA page by reducing some unwanted features to reduce the flow of data transmission. The system also has a high level security to provide a reliable guarantee for the safety of the user.

The development of a second-screen platform focused on education is an innovative concept. The innovation is to provide a consistent educational environment involving the SmartTV platform, mobile devices, web applications and a portal for educational content management systems. A preliminary analyse indicates that the platform will have a major positive effect on online education market. The platform is expected to be used on a daily basis in both the residential and financial institutions and private companies to train employees. The platform can deliver specific educational content for all ages and social categories. It will be used by both consumers and producers of educational content and media trusts. Depending on the type of content, the platform can address various economical and socio-political sectors. This paper presents an interchange format for specifying the multimedia content, format that extends the standard EPUBv3. The EPUBv3 vocabulary has been extended with special tags for describing, cataloging and relating the multimedia content with the television show. By extending the EPUBv3 vocabulary, the educational content could potentialy be visualized on a plethora of devices, from ebook readers to tablets and SmartTVs. During the RO-Twirl European Project, a special viewer was developed for Samsung SmartTVs. Also, a connector has been implemented for the WebLab SOA Platform, exposing the multimedia content to data-mining engines. The potential for an open interchange format for multimedia educational content is great. It could be used in a stand-alone scenario, embeded in SCORM archive or connected with TinCan servers. The proposed format is very versatile. The content could be created manually, using an authoring tool or it could be created automatically with content extracted from different media sources and web services. During the European Ro-TWIRL project, an entire ecosystem of tools has been developed for creating and managing the content in this specific format. Acknowledgements This work is part of the ITEA2 European Project TWIRL - Twinning virtual World Information with Real world data sources

Mobile devices have made the world a small place. They are also being used widely, to access the Web. However, because most available web pages are designed for desktop PC in mind, it is inconvenient to browse these large web pages on a mobile device with a small screen. With the enormous increase in mobile users since last decade, to such an extent that it even exceeds the number of desktop users in many developing countries, it becomes crucial to design systems for Web Manipulation, there by providing easier and greater accessibility and device independence. In this paper, we propose a new browsing technique to facilitate efficient web access and provide a better user experience on a device with rather small screen as compared to the usual desktop. It also proposes a novel technique to handle multimedia content, especially the images and video on a web page. In order to solve the problem of incomplete tags in HTML, an equivalent XML is generated for the desired webpage. For efficient browsing, the web page is represented as a multi level hierarchy, with the index of major sections on the first level and the sections indexed again in to sub-sections on the second level and so on, until we reach sub-sections that can be represented as sub-pages that fit in the small screen. We also propose an efficient algorithm for navigating through the sub-pages, thereby providing better user experience. The proposed technique provides better and efficient web browsing on mobile small displays up to user satisfaction.

An end-use’s experience of any software is typically influenced by the interface presented by the application to the user. For Mixed Reality Environments such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, the user interface is highly visual, and a poor interface can significantly degrade the user experience. Adequate attention is required when designing or creating interfaces and user experience within Mixed Reality Environments as traditional interface design goals and specifications often need to be adjusted. Furthermore, for mixed reality environments on Mobile devices there are additional interface constraints and considerations that would considerably improve the user experience when properly addressed. This research paper discusses the evolution(s) of user interface(s) and user experience of Augmented and Virtual Reality applications on Mobile devices and contributes a framework for improving user interfaces and experience when using Mixed Reality Environments.

The way computing was done has changed a lot in recent times. Nowadays mobile devices have been the stealing the show. These devices come in different specifications, that any multimedia content that is to be played requires transcoding for better user experiences. Cloud based video services cater to the needs of the end user based on their requirements, through video transcoding. Hence video transcoding plays a very important role in today’s evolving streaming media environment. The major problem with video transcoding is that it consumes a lot of time and impacts seriously on the quality of the output. Transcoding uses the device information to transform the video into the required format and this process is done in a distributed fashion, to speed up the process. This work proposes an Intelligent Video Splitter which uses the Map Reduce algorithm to provide efficiency based on time factor. The important performance metrics including video distortion (VD), video distortion due to frame dependency (FDD) were considered. The results showed that the proposed framework perceptibly outperforms than the prevailing strategies. It provides higher video quality as a result of it introduces less video distortion. In future this method may be extended to supply associate automatic device aware video standards.

Objective. This study aimed to confirm the multidimensionality of benefit finding (BF), or silver linings within the cancer experience, assess the effects of Cognitive Behavioral Stress Management (CBSM) on those dimensions, and test the mediating role of perceived stress management skills targeted by CBSM. Methods. This secondary analysis used data from 240 women with stage 0-III breast cancer who completed measures of BF (Benefit Finding Scale) and perceived stress management skills (PSMS) at baseline, 6-months, and 12-months post-randomization into CBSM or a psycho-education condition. We tested a six-factor BF model using Confirmatory Factor Analysis and assessed CBSM-related changes in BF and PSMS using Hierarchical Linear Models. We included significantly affected BF dimensions in mediation models. Results. A six-factor model of BF had good fit [χ2(212) = 391.5, p < .001; CFI = 0.94; RMSEA = 0.06; SRMR = 0.04]. CBSM positively affected changes in personal growth (β = 0.06, p = .01), social relations (β = 0.05, p = .05), and worldview (β = 0.05, p = .02) BF. Perceived relaxation skill increases significantly mediated changes in personal growth (β = 0.03, p = .04) and social relations (β = 0.03, p = .04). Conclusion. Some aspects of perceived stress management skills appear to account for specific BF dimensions and should be considered in future efforts to develop interventions to modulate BF.