Dick Bulterman

• Professor Emeritus at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

SIGWEB is a medium-sized special interest group within ACM. Financially, SIGWEB is in an excellent position to develop and experiment with new initiatives to help promote a vibrant scientific community within our domain. This spring, ACM will hold SIG elections. The SIGWEB nominating committee has decided to offer a new slate of candidates for each...

In desktop multi-party video-conferencing videostreams of participants are delivered in different qualities, but we know little about how such composition of the screen affects the quality of experience. Do the different videostreams serve as indirect quality references and the perceived video quality is thus dependent on other streams in the same...

This paper examines the document aspects of object-based broadcasting. Object-based broadcasting augments traditional video and audio broadcast content with additional (temporally-constrained) media objects. The content of these objects -- as well as their temporal validity -- are determined by the broadcast source, but the actual rendering and pla...

Video-conferencing is becoming an essential part in everyday life. The visual channel allows for interactions which were not possible over audio-only communication systems such as the telephone. However, being a de-facto over-the-top service, the quality of the delivered video-conferencing experience is subject to variations, dependent on network c...

Delay has been found as one of the most crucial factors determining the Quality of Experience (QoE) in synchronous video-mediated communication. The effect has been extensively studied for dyadic conversations and recently the study of small group communications has become the focus of the research community. Contrary to dyads, in which the delay i...

In this paper we discuss communication problems in video-mediated small group discussions. We present results from a study in which ad-hoc groups of five people, with moderator, solved a quiz question-select answer style task over a video-conferencing system. The task was performed under different delay conditions, of up to 2000ms additional one-wa...

As commercial, off-the-shelf, services enable people to easily connect with friends and relatives, video-mediated communication is filtering into our daily activities. With the proliferation of broadband and powerful devices, multi-party gatherings are becoming a reality in home environments. With the technical infrastructure in place and has been...

In this paper we report on our efforts to define a set of document extensions to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow for structured timing and synchronization of elements within a Web page. Our work considers the scenario in which the temporal structure can be decoupled from the content of the Web page in a similar way that CSS does with the la...

3-D tele-immersion (3DTI) enables participants in remote locations to share, in real time, an activity. It offers users interactive and immersive experiences, but it challenges current media-streaming solutions. Work in the past has mainly focused on the efficient delivery of image-based 3-D videos and on realistic rendering and reconstruction of g...

Live 3D reconstruction of a human as a 3D mesh with commodity electronics is becoming a reality. Immersive applications (i.e. cloud gaming, tele-presence) benefit from effective transmission of such content over a bandwidth limited link. In this paper we outline different approaches for compressing live reconstructed mesh geometry based on distribu...

Creating compelling multimedia content is a difficult task. It involves not only the creative process of developing a compelling media-based story, but it also requires significant technical support for content editing, management and distribution. This has been true for printed, audio and visual presentations for centuries. It is certainly true fo...

Geometry based 3D Tele-Immersion is a novel emerging media application that involves on the fly reconstructed 3D mesh geometry. To enable real-time communication of such live reconstructed mesh geometry over a bandwidth limited link, fast dynamic geometry compression is needed. However, most tools and methods have been developed for compressing syn...

With the massive amount of captured multimedia, authoring is more relevant than ever. Multimedia content is available in many settings including the web, mobile devices, desktop applications, as well as games and interactive TV. The authoring and production of multimedia documents demands attention to many issues related to the structure and to the...

With the growing popularity of video communication systems, more people are using group video chat, rather than only one-to-one video calls. In such multi-party sessions, remote participants compete for the available screen space and bandwidth. A common solution is showing the current speaker prominently. Bandwidth limitations may not allow all str...

Creating compelling multimedia productions is a non-trivial problem. The problem is compounded when authors want to integrate community media assets: media fragments contributed by a potentially wide and anonymous recording community. In this paper, we report on a hybrid authoring approach that provides mixed support for automated creation and manu...

One of the original applications of the analysis of social media use was to find a 'back door' through which we (as a community) could obtain insights in the motivations and interactions of users and producers of content. By studying when, where and how often ancillary social content was created, and by studying when, where and how often that socia...

Creating compelling multimedia productions is a nontrivial task. This is as true for creating professional content as it is for nonprofessional editors. During the past 20 years, authoring networked content has been a part of the research agenda of the multimedia community. Unfortunately, authoring has been seen as an initial enterprise that occurs...

Online video sharing systems, such as YouTube, do not provide users enough support to explore community videos that portray people within their social circle. Such services typically consider each video clip as an isolated object, and not as part of a set of related clips. Even though social networks archive media based on higher-order social relat...

Watching digital content together and commenting on it is becoming a social habit between friends and family members living apart. It is also becoming an important value-added activity for business video conferencing. In both cases, the video sharing experience can easily be spoiled if synchronization problems arise, since the context of the conver...

Interactive tabletops offer a unique opportunity for exploring home videos and photos. Nevertheless, there are still a number of unexplored challenges for effectively providing support for collocated group interaction around media. This paper reports on a user study involving 24 users, intended to better understanding the challenges ahead. Our volu...

3D Tele-immersion enables participants in remote locations to share, in real-time, an activity. It offers users natural interactivity and immersive experiences, but it challenges current networking solutions. Work in the past has mainly focused on the efficient delivery of image-based 3D videos and on the realistic rendering and reconstruction of g...

The complexities and physical constraints associated with video transmission make the introduction of video playout delays unavoidable. Tuning systems to reduce delay requires an ability to effectively and easily gather delay metrics on a potentially wide range of systems. In order to support this process, we report on a system called videoLat. Vid...

With the growing popularity of video communication systems, more people are using group video chat, rather than only one-to-one video calls. In such multi-party sessions, remote participants compete for the available screen space and bandwidth. A common solution is showing the current speaker prominently. Bandwidth limitations may not allow all str...

Low-cost video conferencing systems have provided an existence proof for the value of video communication in a home setting. At the same time, current systems have a number of fundamental limitations that inhibit more general social interactions among multiple groups of participants. In our work, we describe the development, implementation and eval...

Multimedia has been a significant area of research for over 20 years. During this time, the role of technology has driven the research agenda. Although the user has played a central role in viewing multimedia information, enabling significant end-user interaction with media has not played a seminal role in most aspects of multimedia research. This...

Multimedia data has two general characteristics that separate it from other types of ICT data: it is inherently intended for human consumption and it is inherently temporal. In this context, it is interesting to note that most multimedia research has held neither the user nor the notion of time as central themes. In this keynote presentation, I arg...

Long before the first transmission in color of a World Cup in 1970, people used to gather around the few existing radio and TV sets to watch together and talk about their favorite programs. Decades later, not only the technology has significantly changed but also people’s consumption and commenting habits. Nowadays, one can easily watch an online v...

Using high-quality video cameras on mobile devices, it is relatively easy to capture a significant volume of video content for community events such as local concerts or sporting events. A more difficult problem is selecting and sequencing individual media fragments that meet the personal interests of a viewer of such content. In this paper, we con...

Hearing a neighbor cheer for a goal seconds before you see it can be very annoying. Currently, many people that upgrade their TV service from analog to digital TV are experiencing this. We briefly describe causes of these (relative) delays. To support this with practical evidence, we report field measurements of relative delays from 19 different re...

Social multimedia is changing the way people interact with each other, transforming old practices on political activism, social participation and interpersonal relationships. Sharing dynamically created video segments is a prime example of this social transformation. This chapter reports on a long field trial studying social practices around person...

Many of the TA2 concept demonstrators study synchronous interactions among groups of users. But not everyone is available at the same time as the rest of their social circle. For this reason, we also studied asynchronous togetherness: being together when it suits you best.

The wide availability of relatively high-quality cameras makes it easy for many users to capture video fragments of social events such as concerts, sports events or community gatherings. The wide availability of simple sharing tools makes it nearly as easy to upload individual fragments to on-line video sites. Current work on video mashups focuses...

This panel extends current efforts from the ACM Multimedia 2011 Organization Committee in taking an important step towards open source projects. The panelists include speakers who are among the leading figures from the open source community. The goal is to provide a shared space for discussion and interaction among consolidated and new open source...

This paper describes a videoconferencing system that meets performance constraints and functional requirements for use in consumer homes. Our system improves existing home technologies (such as video chat) by providing high-quality audio- visual communication, efficient encoding mechanisms, and low end-to-end delay. Moreover, the system includes a...

The evolution in media support within W3C standards has led to the development of HMTL5. HTML5 provides extensive support for audio/video/timed-text within an interoperable browser context. This workshop examines the impact of HTML5 on research and systems support for multimedia documents. We will consider issues such as extensibility, adaptivity a...

Recent developments on Social TV point to an evolution from traditional IPTV services towards more social experiences. Newer applications and services have appeared wherein groups of people in different locations can watch multimedia content while synchronously communicating with each other. We name such applications as synchronous shared experienc...

This paper introduces an evaluated approach to the automatic generation of video narratives from user generated content gathered in a shared repository. In the context of social events, end-users record video material with their personal cameras and upload the content to a common repository. Video narrative techniques, implemented using Narrative S...

Social multimedia is changing the way people interact with each other, transforming old practices on political activism, social participation and interpersonal relationships. Sharing dynamically created video segments is a prime example of this social transformation. This paper reports on a long field trial studying social practices around personal...

In typical video mash-up systems, a group of source videos are compiled off-line into a single composite object. This improves rendering performance, but limits the possibilities for dynamic composition of personalized content. This paper discusses systems and network issues for enabling client-side dynamic composition of video mash-ups. In particu...

In this demo we present how low-level metadata extraction tools have been applied in the context of a pan-European project called Together Anywhere, Together Anytime (TA2). The TA2 project studies new forms of computer-mediated social communications between spatially and temporally distant people. In particular, we concentrate on automatic video an...

This chapter looks at the current changing habits on audiovisual content consumption at home, with special focus on potential uses of mobile devices. Standard television plus a remote control impose a use that is too coarse to support the various personal needs of people, while mobile devices open new possibilities from engagement and immersion int...

This paper introduces a multimedia document model that can structure community comments about media. In particular, we describe a set of temporal transformations for multimedia documents that allow end-users to create and share personalized timed-text comments on third party videos. The benefit over current approaches lays in the usage of a rich ca...

In this paper we introduce the design and implementation of seamless playback for video/audio in the Ambulant Player. The Ambulant Open SMIL Player is an open-source media player that supports SMIL 3.0. A typical SMIL multimedia presentation consists of a set of declarative references to video/audio clips, which are relative to each other in terms...

This paper presents Eureka: a generic methodology of measuring the instantaneous (per second) bandwidth usage of networked games and applications in run time. Eureka starts with constructing a priority queue and sending low priority traffic through it. Then, the application under study is started with its packets marked as high priority. These pack...

This paper discusses the architectural challenges of transitioning from services to experiences. In particular, it focuses on evolution from traditional IPTV services to more social scenarios, in which groups of people in different locations watch synchronized multimedia content together. In addition to the multimedia content, the shared experience...

This paper introduces a community-based video sharing environment to support asynchronous communication among heterogeneous participants within a restricted social community. Unlike other community sharing efforts, our work is predicated on the desire to strengthen existing strong ties among group members, in which existing relationships can be nur...

Inclusion of content with temporal behavior in a structured document leads to such a document gaining temporal semantics. If we then allow changes to the document during its presentation, this brings with it a number of fundamental issues that are related to those temporal semantics. In this paper we study modifications of active multimedia documen...

This paper discusses two upcoming challenges for model-based user interfaces: multimedia and the Web of Things. One the one hand, multimedia content and real-time media transmission have their own temporal model Ð state Ð that has to be seamless integrated into the user interface event model. On the other hand, thousands of interconnected objects t...

This paper presents Eureka: a generic methodology of measuring the instantaneous (per second) bandwidth usage of networked games and applications in run time. Eureka starts with constructing a priority queue and sending low priority traffic through it. Then, the application under study is started with its packets marked as high priority. These pack...

Over the last years we have witnessed a rapid transformation on how people use digital media. Thanks to innovative interfaces, non-professional users are becoming active nodes in the content production chain by uploading, commenting, and sharing their media. As a result, people now use media for communication purposes, for sharing experiences, and...

The objective of this work is to define a document model extension that enables complex spatial and temporal interactions within multimedia documents. As an example we describe an authoring interface of a photo sharing system that can be used to capture stories in an open, declarative format. The document model extension defines visual transformati...

The migration of media consumption to personal computers retains distributed social viewing, but only via nonsocial, strictly personal interfaces. This article presents an architecture, and implementation for media sharing that allows for enhanced social interactions among users. Using a mixed-device model, our work allows targeted, personalized en...

This paper reports on an architecture, and a working implementation, for using secondary screens in the interactive television environment. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the television experience, there are situations in which people perform as well a secondary task, whilst watching. In the living room,...

Document engineering is the computer science discipline that investigates systems for documents in any form and in all media. As with the relationship between software engineering and software, document engineering is concerned with principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, and maintain documents (http://www.docume...

In this paper we examine adaptive time-based web applications (or presentations). These are interactive presentations where time dictates which parts of the application are presented (providing the major structuring paradigm), and that require interactivity and other dynamic adaptation. We investigate the current technologies available to create su...

This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm for real time network delivery of packets over Diserv networks for de- lay sensitive applications. We name the networks that sup- port this algorithm as Estimated Service (Estserv) networks. These networks, for real time packets, estimate the prob- ability of the packet meeting its deadline and schedul...

In this paper we introduce the design and implementation of seamless playback for video/audio in Ambulant Player. The Ambulant Open SMIL Player is an open-source media player that supports SMIL 3.0. A typical SMIL multimedia presentation consists of a set of references to video/audio clips, which are relative to each other in terms of temporal and...

In this paper, we single out one of the problem aspects of multimedia: how can one efficiently store high-quality picture information in a manner that does not make its retrieval characteristics incompatible with the needs of a (distributed) multimedia application. These needs include: timely access to data, predictable access to common (i.e., netw...

This paper reports on an architecture, and a working implementation, for using secondary screens in the interactive television environment. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the television experience, there are situations in which people perform as well a secondary task, whilst watching. In the living room...

This chapter reports on the Ambulant Annotator, a middleware extension for Personal Digital Recorders (PDR), in the form of a lightweight authoring tool, which allows the viewer to personalize television content and share it with others. Traditionally, social interactive television research has focused on the provision of synchronous communication...

This chapter aims to define a research agenda regarding the software graphics architecture for interactive digital television (iDTV). It is important to note that by iDTV we do not refer to the provision of a return path, but rather to the potential impact the user has over the television (both video stream and applications) content. We can differe...

This chapter aims to define a research agenda regarding the software graphics architecture for interactive digital television (iDTV). It is important to note that by iDTV we do not refer to the provision of a return path, but rather to the potential impact the user has over the television (both video stream and applications) content. We can differe...

The research area of interactive digital TV is in the midst of a significant revival. Unlike the first generation of digital TV, which focused on producer concerns that effectively limited (re)distribution, the current generation of research is closely linked to the role of the user in selecting, producing, and distributing content. The research fi...

This paper investigates a number of techniques and services around a unifying concept: the secondary screen. Far too often television consumption is considered a passive activity. While there are specific genres and programs that immerse the viewer into the media experience, there are other times in which whilst watching television, people talk, sc...

Despite most of the authoring systems for digital TV assume the author to be seated in front of a computer on the broadcaster side, current research is interested in the new role of the viewer in producing and distributing content. The goal of this paper is to identify a number of research directions around the authoring from the couch paradigm, an...

Television-watching has always been a social activity. In the living room people watch television together and outside home people talk about last night’s soccer match or even call each other to recommend an interesting program. Nevertheless, the pressures of daily life and the increase in the number of separated households make joint television vi...

Traditionally, an end-user has played only a pas- sive role when viewing commercial media: he/she is ex- pected to consume content, not interact with it. In this paper we explore advanced user interaction techniques in the home environment. One example of such ad- vanced interaction is the creation of micro-personalized recommendations: messages th...

Non-monolithic renderers are physically distributed me- dia playback engines. Non-monolithic renderers may use a number of different underlying network connection types to transmit media items belonging to a presentation. There is therefore a need for a media based and inter-network- type synchronization algorithm. NeighbourCast is a algo- rithm fo...

Television, since its invention, has been considered a social link between people. This paper presents an architecture that enhances this social link by support- ing micro-personal recommendation messages of tele- vision content. The architecture allows end-users to share a fragment of television content, with optional media overlays, with others....

For this special issue on Multimedia Systems, Languages, and Infrastructures for Interactive Television the four best papers on multimedia systems and infrastructures were invited to extend their conference contribution in the form of a journal paper. These papers cover a wide range of current challenges for multimedia systems: content recommendati...

This demo presents a new approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer. Our approach presents an...

This paper presents an approach for media presentation continuity in playback mode. We use the term presentation continuity over session transfer since our solution is at the presentation layer. Previous research on this topic has focused on transferring a particular stream or set of related streams at the sessions layer for live broadcasting or co...

This paper demonstrates the advantages of using structured multimedia documents for session management and media distribution in ubiquitous environments. We show how document manipulations can be used to perform powerful operations such as content to context adaptation and presentation continuity. When consuming media in ubiquitous environments, wh...

In this paper we examine adaptive time-based web applications (or presentations). These are interactive presentations where time dictates the major structure, and that require interactivity and other dynamic adaptation. We investigate the current technologies available to create such presentations and their shortcomings, and suggest a mechanism for...

This working session will be an interactive discussion about multimedia content transformation. The basic assumption is that content transformation activities should be provided as non-destructive operations. The final goal of the panel is to gather researchers within the community interested in manipulating multimedia content for providing rich us...

In this paper, we look at how television genres can play a role in the use of social interactive television systems (social iTV). Based on a user study of a system for sending and receiving enriched video fragments to and from a range of devices, we discuss which genres are preferred for talking while watching, talking about after watching and for...

Media consumption is an inherently social activity, serving to communicate ideas and emotions across both small-and large-scale communities. The migration of the media experience to personal computers retains social viewing, but typically only via a non-social, strictly personal interface. This paper presents an architecture and implementation for...

This paper introduces an architecture, together with an implemented scenario, capable of dynamically adapt the way mobile users consume and interact with multimedia content. The architecture is based on a representative scenario identified by the European project SPICE, in which multimedia content is distributed to a user independently of his/her c...

The SMIL 3.0 language is the W3C's standard language for web-based multimedia. This book provides a comprehensive guide to all of SMIL's elements and attributes for all versions, from the complete SMIL Language profile to SMIL Tiny. Driven by dozens of examples and illustrated code fragments, every aspect of SMIL is treated in this book. Starting...

The research area of interactive digital TV is in the midst of a significant revival. Unlike the first generation of digital TV, which focused on producer concerns that effectively limited (re)distribution, the current generation of research is closely linked to the role of the user in selecting, producing, and distributing content. The research fi...

This paper describes an approach to defining, manipulating and sharing state variables between a web browser and a multimedia presentation engine in functionally compound XML-based documents. This framework, which we call smilState: the SMIL XML State Architecture, is a fully declarative approach to sharing state without the need for extensive scri...

This paper presents a synchronisation algorithm for wireless ad hoc networks called NeighbourCast. The major requirements we impose on the algorithm are a short convergence time, low battery consumption which is achieved by low collision and low channel contention, minimum network overhead, and a distributed approach. We achieve these by restrictin...

Commercial-designer success criteria, an enterprise perspective.

In spite of the high profile of media types such as video, audio and images, many multimedia presentations rely extensively on text content. Text can be used for incidental labels, or as subtitles or captions that accompany other media objects. In a multimedia document, text content is not only constrained by the need to support presentation styles...

This paper presents an architecture for non-intrusive user interfaces in the interactive digital TV domain. The architecture is based on two concepts. First, the deployment of non-monolithic rendering for content consumption, which allows micro-level personalization of content delivery by utilizing different rendering components (e.g., sending vide...

This paper presents a model and architecture for non-intrusive user interfaces in the interactive digital TV domain. The model is based on two concepts: non-monolithic rendering for content consumption and actions descriptions for user interaction. In the first case, subsets of the multimedia content can be delivered to different rendering componen...

The focus of much of the research on providing user-centered control of multimedia has been on the definition of models and (meta-data) descriptions that assist in locating or recommending media objects. While this can provide a more efficient means of selecting content, it provides little extra control for users once that content is rendered. In t...

This paper describes an approach to defining and manipu-lating external state variables in declarative, XML-based multimedia documents. We call this framework txState, the Temporal XML State Architecture. The state variables in txState are defined using standard Web technologies such as XPath, XForms and XSLT, which have been extended to interact w...

Since the arrival of YouTube on the desktop, video has entered its second lifetime on the Web. The main difference between this incarnation of video and its predecessors is at the source: where first generation video was about repurposing content, the YouTube generation is all about usergenerated content and few-to-few (rather than one-to-many) sha...

This chapter aims to define a research agenda regarding the software graphics architecture for interactive digital television (iDTV). It is important to note that by iDTV we do not refer to the provision of a return path, but rather to the potential impact the user has over the television (both video stream and applications) content. We can differe...

The research area of interactive digital television is in the midst of a significant revival. Unlike the first generation of digital television – which focused on the concerns of producers and broadcasters, and limited the end-user impact – the current generation of digital television research is closely linked to the role of the user in selecting,...

This paper proposes an extension to the television-watching paradigm that permits an end-user to enrich broadcast content. Examples of this enriched content are: virtual edits that allow the order of presentation within the content to be changed or that allow the content to be subsetted; conditional text, graphic or video objects that can be placed...

This chapter aims to define a research agenda regarding the software graphics architecture for interactive digital television (iDTV). It is important to note that by iDTV we do not refer to the provision of a return path, but rather to the potential impact the user has over the television (both video stream and applications) content. We can differe...