Atsushi Iizawa

Automatic generation of graphical user interfaces for interactive database applications

This paper presents a system that allows the automatic generation of graphical user interfaces (GUI) for interactive database applications. The system is intended for novice application developers with limited experience in the design and implementation of graphical user interfaces, and with only a basic understanding of the conceptual database schema. The main components of the system are an automatic screen layout generator and a visual specification language in which end-user requirements are described through the direct manipulation of an Entity-Relationship diagram of the database. The visual language provides a series of operators that enable the systematic transformation of the schema diagram into a seeond type of graph, termed application specification diagram, that defines the entities and relationships of interest. An interpreter translates these diagrams into textual descriptions of the application that are used as input to the automatic screen layout generator. This mechanism performs the widget selection and placement tasks associated with the design of the GUI. It also generates the code needed to materialize it.

A TV program generation system using digest video scenes and a scripting markup language

This paper describes a TV program generation system using digest video scenes that are retrieved from video streams with the program indexes. The key features of the system are: (1) TV programs can be dynamically generated from digest video scenes selected by user preference. (2) Directions can be added using a happiness or sadness level based on the user preferences. (3) Personalized TV programs for an individual viewer can be made. The procedures taken by the system are as follows: (1) Conjunctive expressions between scenes are automatically generated; (2) Emotional expressions are automatically generated by user preference; (3) TV program metaphors are defined; (4) Direction templates corresponding to the metaphors are defined; (5) These expressions and definitions are coded using a markup language, and (6) Contents such as virtual characters and movies are synchronized. The resultant program can be shown on a TV set.

Personalized digests of sports programs using intuitive retrieval and semantic analysis

Recently, digital broadcasting has experienced rapid growth. Digital broadcasting can deliver additional data as program attachments, which viewers can use to flexibly browse and retrieve parts of the program on their TV-receiving terminals. They can also make personalized digests from the broadcast TV programs. This function is particularly useful for viewers of sports programs because the digests reflect varied viewer preferences, such as favorite teams and players. This paper presents a method for making personalized digests for sports programs using additional data attachments.

A Rule-Based Scheme to Make Personal Digests from Video Program Meta Data

Content providers have recently started adding a variety of meta data to various video programs; these data provide primitive descriptors of the video contents. Personal digest viewing that uses the meta data is a new application in the digital broadcasting era. To build personal digests, semantic program structures must be constructed and significant scenes must be identified. Digests are currently made manually at content provider sites. This is time-consuming and increases the cost. This paper proposes a way to solve these problems with a rule-based personal digest-making scheme (PDMS) that can automatically and dynamically make personal digests from the meta data. In PDMS, depending on properties of the video program contents and viewer preferences, high-level semantic program structures can be constructed from the added primitive meta data and significant scenes can be extracted. The paper illustrates a formal PDMS model. It also presents detailed evaluation results of PDMS using the contents of a professional baseball game TV program.

Implementation and performance evaluation of compressed bit-sliced signature files

This paper describes design and implementation techniques of the signature file access method. It has been implemented and embedded in RICOHBASE, a commercial DBMS product based on an extended relational data model. This is our first experience of practical implementation of this access method, although some experimental implementations exist. We discuss some design topics which turn into issues in practical environment.

Significant scene extraction method using situation importance

Sports videos for mobile terminals and PCs and other multimedia information services have recently spread. The ability to efficiently extract significant scenes is important with these services. We proposed the personal digest making scheme (PDMS), which calculates the significance of events in a sports game based on video meta data and extracts significant scenes to compose a digest. PDMS calculations focus on additional-point event significance, so the system cannot analyze low-score games correctly. To address the problem, we explain a method of calculating situation importance before events happen, which takes into account when extracting significant scenes. Situation importance affords a degree of chance. Using situation importance makes it possible to extract significant scenes more correctly.

Image database construction tools for RICOHBASE

There has been a rapid evolution in image processing technologies while at the same time the facilities/capabilities required/expected of image database systems have also increased. However, the variety of image peripherals and the differences between their data formats make system integration and extension difficult. To overcome this problem, a set of image database construction tools called IMAZONE was developed. A description is presented of IMAZONE and its underlying database management system RICOHBASE.<<ETX>>

Digest making method based on turning point analysis

A huge amount of multimedia content is available in the current Web environment. Streaming of video programs has become one of the popular Web-based information services. Automatic digest generation is an important application using video program streams. We have developed a digest making method called PDMS (Personal Digest Making Scheme). PDMS extracts significant scenes and constructs digests automatically using the video program meta data. In PDMS, only a successful play event such as a goal scored was considered significant, and a misplay event, such as a shot that did not score was not taken into account, although such an event may affect the game progress. This paper introduces a new concept of turning point analysis into PDMS. The turning point analysis is based on a winning probability for a sports programs. The winning probability indicates the probability of a home team beating an away team at the end of the game, given the current score and the time elapsed since the beginning of the game. Using the winning probability, we can more precisely evaluate the significance of each event, not merely a successful play but also a misplay. This paper presents turning point analysis for a soccer match. It also gives evaluation results of this extended PDMS, including turning point analysis for a recently broadcasted professional soccer match.

FBDA: A filtering mechanism based on distance approximation

In this paper, we propose a filtering mechanism called FBDA(Filtering mechanism Based on Distance Approximation) for various kinds of information delivered in a broadcasting environment. FBDA is based on a metric space model in which a client filters out received data that is not within a specified distance of the users preferred data. Since the cost of the distance calculation is generally high, we eliminated it by using approximation based on triangle inequality. FBDA offers effective filtering without requiring clients to have high processing capability. Results from experimental simulations verify the effectiveness of FBDA.

The ECHO method: concurrency control method for a large-scale distributed database

When constructing a large-scale database system, data replication is useful to give users efficient access to that data. However for databases with a very large number of replica sites, using traditional networking concurrency control protocols makes communication too costly for practical use. In this paper we propose a new protocol called ECHO for concurrency control of replica data distributed on a large scale. Using broadcasting, such as satellite broadcasting, terrestrial broadcasting, and cable television, the ECHO method can keep communication costs constant, regardless of the number of sites. The ECHO method also has a backup mechanism for failed broadcast reception using the communication network.