Kai Michael Höver

Automatic Camera Control for Tracking a Presenter during a Talk

Today, talks, presentations, and lectures are often captured on video to give a broad audience the possibility to (re-)access the content. As presenters are often moving around during a talk it is necessary to guide recording cameras. We present an automatic solution for user tracking and camera control. It uses a depth camera for user tracking, and a scalable networking architecture based on publish/subscribe messaging for controlling multiple video cameras. Furthermore, we present our experiences with the system during actual lectures at an university.

DLH/CLLS: An Open, Extensible System Design for Prosuming Lecture Recordings and Integrating Multimedia Learning Ecosystems

The production of lecture recordings is becoming increasingly important for university education and highly appreciated by students. However, those lecture recordings and corresponding systems are only a subset of different kinds of learning materials and learning tools that exist in learning environments. This demands for learning system designs that are easily accessible, extensible, and open for the integration with other environments, data sources, and user (inter-)actions. The contributions of this paper is as follows: we suggest a system that supports educators in presenting, recording, and providing their lectures as well as a system design following Linked Data principles to facilitate integration and users to interact with both each other and learning materials.

S-BPM-Ont: An Ontology for Describing and Interchanging S-BPM Processes

The description of business processes is important for an unambiguous definition and its reusability. However, due to different data models of business modeling tools, an exchange of process definitions is difficult. This demands for a formal model of business processes. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization and can therefore be used as an (inter)lingua to describe S-BPM processes. This paper presents a S-BPM ontology modeled with the Web Ontology Language.

Integrating Distributed Discussions in Web 2.0 Applications and Their Integration with Lecture Recordings

With the rise of Web 2.0 tools, courses often use more than one platform for commenting and discussing educational contents, e.g., both a discussion forum like Moodle and an online social network site like Facebook. If so, users may not be aware of discussions happening on one site and are uncertain where to post their contributions. Therefore, there is a need for integrating different discussion sites. However, the integration is difficult due to different data formats. In this paper, an approach is presented that makes use of ontologies and enterprise integration patterns for seamlessly integrating discussion sites. Further, it is shown how discussions can be easily integrated with lecture recordings on a data level, and be stored for later reuse by using Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles.

Interchanging and preserving presentation recordings

The importance of presentation recordings is steadily increasing. This trend is indicated for example by the growing MOOCs market. Many systems for the production of such recordings exist. However, produced recordings are not exchangeable between systems due to different representation formats. In this paper, we present an ontology for the conceptual description of presentation recordings and describe the transformation process between different systems. Furthermore, we explain how this ontology can be used to preserve presentation recordings as ebooks.

LOOCs -- Linked Open Online Courses: A Vision

Due to different data models, MOOCs are often monolithic and closed creations, which complicates the task of exchanging, reusing, and retrieving learning materials of different MOOCs. In this paper, we advocate that MOOCs should also be LOOCs (Linked Open Online Courses) to enable interoperability and interlinking data. We present a MOOC application and how it becomes a LOOC by making use of Semantic Web technologies.

Linked data selectors

In the world of Linked Data, HTTP URIs are names. A URI is dereferenced to obtain a copy or description of the referred resource. If only a fragment of a resource should be referred, pointing to the whole resource is not sufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to be able to refer to fragments of resources, and to name them with URIs to interlink them in the Web of Data. This is especially helpful in the educational context where learning processes including discussion and social interaction demand for exact references and granular selections of media. This paper presents the specification of Linked Data Selectors, an OWL ontology for describing dereferenceable fragments of Web resources.

A Domain Specific Language for Describing S-BPM Processes

Natural language is the first choice for most stakeholders for describing business processes. S-BPM addresses this by taking basic natural language structure into consideration. However, so far S-BPM processes can only be modeled with graph-based tools. Although graph-based tools provide a good overview of processes they have also their disadvantages, because changing or adding language elements is costly, and graphical symbols cannot be written like natural sentences. In this paper, we present a Domain Specific Language to specify S-BPM processes and a process engine kernel for executing these modeled processes.

Read/Write Lectures: Fostering Active Participation and Increasing Student Engagement in the Lecture Hall

In technology-enhanced lectures, the support of student engagement during lectures is still rudimentary compared to that of educators. Yet, participation and active learning are key factors for learning success. By applying the Web 2.0 paradigm of active participation to lectures, students become actively involved as both consumers and producers of learning resources. Based on a survey of related work, we propose a system that facilitates active participation and contribution to increase student engagement.

A depth camera based approach for automatic control of video cameras in lecture halls

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to present a depth information-based solution for automatic camera control, depending on the presenter’s moving positions. Talks, presentations and lectures are often captured on video to give a broad audience the possibility to (re-)access the content. As presenters are often moving around during a talk, it is necessary to steer recording cameras. Design/methodology/approach – We use depth information from Kinect to implement a prototypical application to automatically steer multiple cameras for recording a talk. Findings – We present our experiences with the system during actual lectures at a university. We found out that Kinect is applicable for tracking a presenter during a talk robustly. Nevertheless, our prototypical solution reveals potential for improvements, which we discuss in our future work section. Originality/value – Tracking a presenter is based on a skeleton model extracted from depth information instead of using two-dimensional (2D) motion- or bright...