Risto Sarvas

Metadata creation system for mobile images

The amount of personal digital media is increasing, and managing it has become a pressing problem. Effective management of media content is not possible without content-related metadata. In this paper we describe a content metadata creation process for images taken with a mobile phone. The design goals were to automate the creation of image content metadata by leveraging automatically available contextual metadata on the mobile phone, to use similarity processing algorithms for reusing shared metadata and images on a remote server, and to interact with the mobile phone user during image capture to confirm and augment the system supplied metadata. We built a prototype system to evaluate the designed metadata creation process. The main findings were that the creation process could be implemented with current technology and it facilitated the creation of semantic metadata at the time of image capture.

From context to content: leveraging context to infer media metadata

The recent popularity of mobile camera phones allows for new opportunities to gather important metadata at the point of capture. This paper describes a method for generating metadata for photos using spatial, temporal, and social context. We describe a system we implemented for inferring location information for pictures taken with camera phones and its performance evaluation. We propose that leveraging contextual metadata at the point of capture can address the problems of the semantic and sensory gaps. In particular, combining and sharing spatial, temporal, and social contextual metadata from a given user and across users allows us to make inferences about media content.

From Snapshots to Social Media - The Changing Picture of Domestic Photography

From Snapshots to Social Media describes the history and future of domestic photography as mediated by technological change. Domestic photography refers to the culture of ordinary people capturing, sharing and using photographs, and is in a particular state of flux today as photos go digital. The book argues that this digital era is the third major chapter in the 170 year history of the area; following the portrait and Kodak eras of the past. History shows that despite huge changes in photographic technology and the way it has been sold, people continue to use photographs to improve memory, support communication and reinforce identity. The future will involve a shift in the balance of these core activities and a replacement of the family album with various multimedia archives for individuals, families and communities. This raises a number of issues that should be taken into account when designing new technologies and business services in this area, including: the ownership and privacy of content, multimedia standards, home ICT infrastructure, and younger and older users of images. The book is a must for designers and engineers of imaging technology and social media who want a better understanding of the history of domestic photography in order to shape its future. It will also be of value to students and researchers in science and technology studies and visual culture, as a fascinating case study of the evolving use of photographs and photographic technology in Western society.

MobShare: controlled and immediate sharing of mobile images

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a mobile one picture sharing system <i>MobShare</i> that enables immediate, controlled, and organized sharing of mobile pictures, and the browsing, combining, and discussion of the shared pictures. The design combines research on otogray, personal image management, mobile one camera use, mobile picture publishing, and an interview study we conducted on mobile one camera users. The system is based on a client-server architecture and uses current mobile one and web technology. The implementation describes novel solutions in immediate sharing of mobile images to an organized web album, and in providing full control over with whom the images are shared. Also, we describe new ways of promoting discussion in sharing images and enabling the combination and comparison of personal and shared pictures. The system proves that the designed solutions can be implemented with current technology and provides novel approaches to general issues in sharing digital images.

Supporting the shared experience of spectators through mobile group media

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.

Building social discourse around mobile photos: a systemic perspective

Camera phones have been viewed simplistically as digital cameras with poor picture quality while neglecting the utility of the two key functionalities of mobile phones: network connection and access to personal information. This is the first HCI paper to examine mobile photos from a systemic perspective: how assignment of phases of mobile photo lifecycle to different platforms affects social discourse around shared photos. We conducted a 6-week user trial of MobShare, a tripartite system with dedicated functions and task couplings for a mobile phone, a server, and a PC browser. We analyze how MobShares couplings and distribution of functionalities affected the observed types of social discourse that formed around mobile photos: in-group post-event discourse, self-documents and reports, greetings and thanks. Several central design issues arising from the systemic view are discussed: heterogeneity of environments, integration and distribution of functionalities, couplings and decouplings of interaction tasks, notification mechanisms, and provision of necessary UI resources for different tasks.

“I can't lie anymore!”: The implications of location automation for mobile social applications

Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that surreptitiously collect and propagate location information among users and we provide results from the first systematic real world study of the matter. Our observations come from a case study of Jaiku, a mobile microblogging service that automates disclosure and diffusion of location information. Three user groups in Finland and California used Jaiku for several months. The results reveal issues related to control, understanding, emergent practices, and privacy. The results convey that unsuitable automated features can preclude use in a group. While one group found automated features useful, and another was indifferent toward it, the third group stopped using the application almost entirely. To conclude, we discuss the need for user-centered development of automated features in location-based services.

DiMaS : distributing multimedia on peer-to-peer file sharing networks

This demonstration presents the Digital Content Distribution Management System (DiMaS). DiMaS proves as a concept that it is possible to make a system for multimedia producing communities to publish their work on highly popular P2P networks, and importantly, the system enables producers to insert content metadata, to manage intellectual property and usage rights, and to charge for the consumption. All this can be done without introducing another new content or metadata file format and a dedicated client application to read the format.

Interactive search and browsing interface for large-scale visual repositories

Due to the rapid proliferation of both user-generated and broadcasted content, the interfaces for search and browsing of visual media have become increasingly important. This paper presents a novel intuitive interactive interface for browsing of large-scale image and video collections. It visualises underlying structure of the dataset by the size and spatial relations of displayed images. In order to achieve this, images or video key-frames are initially clustered using an unsupervised graph-based clustering algorithm. By selecting images that are hierarchically laid out on the screen, user can intuitively navigate through the collection or search for specific content. The extensive experimental results based on user evaluation of photo search, browsing and selection as well as interactive video search demonstrate good usability of the presented system and improvement when compared to the standard methods for interaction with large-scale image and video collections.

HCI and innovation

The user-centered design (UCD) process in HCI has recently been criticized for not delivering breakthrough innovations in technology. In this paper we consider this critique through a literature review and two case studies of innovation. Our conclusions suggest that there is nothing wrong with the attitude of user-centered design which has probably been present in all major innovations down the centuries. Rather, the practice of UCD in HCI lacks attention to business factors and long term uptake of technology in society. This compromises its impact on products and should be incorporated into the study of HCI itself.