Herkko Hietanen

What's with the free images?: a study of Flickr's creative commons attribution images

Our survey of the Flickr photo sites Creative Commons attribution licensed images reveals that there is a wide variety of high quality of relevant stock images available. However, searching the images can be demanding since the image metadata is inconsistent. The main problem of finding open images is that the search tools are mostly based on user generated tags. The search results would benefit from human sorting and simple machine vision analysis. These steps might be able to close the gap between commercial stock photo and open image collections.

Helping in the legal use of open images

Media creation applications cater poorly to one very common usage: Situations in which the users need media that they do not own and for which they are unwilling to pay. Finding and using externally produced media is currently a cumbersome process. Often, users locate the content using a search engine, copy it into their work, cross their fingers, and hope they do not infringe on any copyrights. While the authors have shared hundreds of millions of images with permissive licenses, the license terms are too complicated for other users to follow. In our studies, we found that even the well-intentioned users still fail to respect copyrights in simple image reuse situations. We therefore introduce an Open Media Retrieval (OMR) model to remedy this problem and supplement it with prototypes that access various legal image sources directly within the creative work flow and provide automatic credits to the original authors.

The changing dynamics of television advertising

Advertising on the online video platforms has yet to meet the expectations that advertiser and platforms have placed on it. However, the growing trend of using the Internet to access video offers advertisers the opportunity to target viewers more accurately than broadcast television ever has. The complicated commercial television broadcast dynamics are evolving to facilitate online distribution. Many actors in the broadcast value network are adjusting their value propositions and new nodes are emerging to pair viewers with programs, and advertisers with relevant viewers. These changes are occurring because the Internet as an interactive distribution channel does not recognize television channels, schedules or regional broadcasting areas. The changes will affect the way television networks and other video platforms sell advertisement spaces. Audience measuring changes and advertisers start dynamically serving advertisements unlike in the past when networks did the placement. The platform owners will evolve from sellers of static and predefined advertising inventory to providers of dynamic advertisement opportunities to targeted segments.