More on storytelling

Ramesh Jain has uploaded his presentation on objective storytelling from the ACM multimedia conference last week.    Ramesh introduces the notion of personicle as "personal chronicle". This notion stands for a collection of events that describe the story of a single person in a specific time context (day, year etc...).  A story is a collection of events that are represented in multimedia fashion, where currently digital pictures are the dominant way of representation.    The objective story is the collection of events documenting the story.  

This is an interesting concept, and I intend to look at the notion of events creating stories also in other areas where events, the interaction between events, and stories interact.   For example: creative adaptive stories using event flows.   I'll write more about this topic at a later phase. 

On the huevent'14 workshop at ACM Multimedia 2014

This is me looks small standing near a slide from my presentation at the huevent'14 workshop.  This was kind of a keynote talk so I could talk for an hour (which is better than a typical conference talk of 20 minutes).  My talk is similar to some recent talks and can be found on slideshare. 

One new thing is that  I have cited a recent post by Chris Curan entitled: "12 hurdles hampering the Internet of Things".    There is also a position paper co-authored with Fabiana Fournier that is available through the ACM digital library. 

An interesting keynote given by Ramesh Jain on storytelling.  Ramesh views a story as a flow of events. This is an interesting concept. I guess that the relationship among events is a function of the genre.  For documentary  story events are coming in a sequence of chronological order, in a detective story, the crime is an event, and later events are relating backwards to previous events in the way to solve the mystery.   Other stories have other patterns.  This is an interesting topic to investigate further, and I'll continue to do so in the framework of the work on creative skills which is part of the agenda of my institute.      More about this - later 

New interesting slideshare presentations: multimedia & big data and WS02 CEP

Looking at Slideshare, I cam across two new interesting presentations.

The first one by Ramesh Jain, entitled:  "multimedia & big data".  Ramesh used the analog of the "blind men trying to understand what is an elephant" that I also used before in another context, and says that we create silos by the different senses (and media), and discusses the integration of all events grasped by the different senses (and media) to create storytelling.   He discusses some of the challenges of situation modelling and detection in that environment.  The challenges and directions are certainly where I believe the world, and the value of big data are taking us.

The second presentation is by WS02, a Sri-Lanka based company, introducing their complex event processor    AKA Siddhi. This is presented in the context of big data and describes the architecture and the language.

On the role of storytelling

Storytelling became a popular trend.  While Steve Jobs made it popular, it is quite an ancient art.   My first comprehensive written document, submitted for promotion in the Israeli Air-Force, started with a story telling that when I started writing this, I had a terrible tooth pain.  The examiners actually were quite surprised, especially when in first few pages they had to go through a series of caricatures (I never knew how to draw, but I enlisted people who knew to help).   Their first reaction was -- this guy is not serious,  this is supposed to be a serious professional project.  However, when they kept reading, they understood why the story served as a good introduction to the project, and provided the ultimate motivation for what I am doing. Since that time I am practicing storytelling from time to time.  I found it very powerful, especially as a way to start a presentation, or in long presentations as a way to regain attention.  The art is to do the storytelling natural to the presentation, it has to be relevant and have a message or emphasize a point,  and not a distraction on out-of-context issue.   I notice that now there are even competitions on digital storytelling, 

The IBM CEO, Ginny Rometty, is famous for practicing storytelling.

Now I am looking for some good story for my next week tutorial in ER 2013.  I have to talk for three hours alone, so good stories are essential to get by...