On events in multimedia research

Back at home -- I promised to provide some summary of impression from the events in multimedia workshop I attended earlier this week.    Meanwhile some of the presentation have been uploaded to the workshop website, as well as some pictures.    I recommend to view the presentation of  Ansgar Shcerp, it is the most interesting one (to me). 

I was not familiar with the multimedia research until being invited to this conference to have a dialogue with them.  My impression is that what they are doing is complementary to what we do in the event processing universe.   We assume that events exist and we need to process them, they start from pictures and video streams and try to detect what event is described in the picture, they care less about what somebody does with the event after being detected.    They have long discussions about "what is an event",  events that they have talked about in some talks are social events, sport events etc.   I think that a synergy between different communities who deal with different phases of the event processing story is vital in order to exploit events that come from multimedia sources, and will continue the dialogue with them/.  

On event semantics -- my talk in the event-based multimedia workshop

Still in Barcelona for the event-based multimedia workshop.   I still need to write on the second day and the closing panel (in which I also participated), and my impression about the event-based multimedia community.

Meanwhile -- I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare, parts of it is reuse of other presentation (e.g. the slides explaining the notion of context),  the new stuff is about the semantics -- who are the players in the event game.    I am planned to give a long tutorial on event modeling in ER 2013 next month - stay tuned. 

Workshop on event-based media integration and processing - the first day

This is the logo of the ACM multimedia 2013 conference that is taking place these days in Barcelona.

Co-located with this conference (we share the coffee in the coffee break) is the event-based media workshop which I am attending.  My talk is planned for today, so yesterday I was just a listener in the first day.   Here are some impressions:

The most interesting talk was the one by Ramesh Jain,  who is working on events in multimedia for a while.

Ramesh talked about cybernetics in society, and about smart systems defined as smart actions in respond to smartly detected situations.   He also talked about social networks and the Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Ramesh said that the social media concentrates on the third and fours layer - love/belonging and esteem,and posed as a challenge to get more focused on the basic needs - the two lower layers.  

Ramesh also talked about the 4V of big data,  Saying that the volume is the least important one -- as there are methods to partition the space, but the other three actually issue -- event processing in multimedia under uncertainty.  Ramesh mentioned  the Israeli company Waze (recently acquired by Google) as example of a smart social system.  

Some of the other talks concentrated about analysis of pictures that are put on social networks and try to identify the event they are describing, first see if they describe an event, and then identify the event - talking about sport events, public events, family events and more.   It is funny, since some of the event definitions view event as instantaneous occurrence - and then a sport event (say football game) is not an event since it takes (net) 90 minutes.  I guess that there are different views of events -- I'll mention it in my talk today.

There is no Internet of Things - (yet?)

"There is no Internet of Things", this is a title of a promotion for a recent Forrester report.  The report has one more word in its title -- "yet".   The (right) claim is that while there are a lot of sensors, mobile devices, wearable computing devices and vision about "Internet of Things",  and recently "Internet of everything", the vision was not fulfilled yet, and the world of sensors is still very fragmented.   

What made the (current) Internet successful is a combination of standard protocols, the ease of creating content, and the ease of retrieving its content with the combination of web browsers and search engines.  

In order for the Internet of Things to become "Internet" - there is a need to make it much simpler and standard oriented.  Imagine that in the current Internet the retrieval from the Internet would have required everybody to write SQL queries --  do you think that the Internet  would have become pervasive?

What is the equivalent?  --  standard and simple way to perform the functionality of IoT.   I'll be able to report about our related work  in a few weeks -- stay tuned. 

Start of a new semseter and upcoming talks

I have not written recently -- some due to a short vacation (in Paris), and some due to seasonal laziness.. 

In any event - this week the semester started in Israel, and I am giving an Event Processing course again at the Technion, this time I am doing some change in the course.   The course is still based on the EPIA book,  but I am updating now to teach event processing through a model-based approach, which corresponds to the project we are working on recently.  We are going to do first public exposure of this work in ER 2013 in Hong-Kong.  I'll write about it later.  

Next week, I am giving keynote talk in an event oriented workshop co-located with ACM Multimedia 2013.  in which I'll talk about the semantics and modeling of situations and contexts.   Both talks will become public after they are given.   

The low latency game: reported 176 ns for high performance trading

While I don't have any way to verify the reported results,  the low latency portal reports on  "groundbreaking results" by Argon Design. Anyway - the reported latency is 176 nano second,  to those unfamiliar with the term -- there are billion (1,000,000,000) nano second within one second...   Recently I wrote on time perception of different animals.  If the time perception of a person is limited to 1/60 of a second, then you can do the arithmetic to calculate how faster this technology is relative to human perception.  It is interesting to check is there a limit to the time perception of computerized system.   Building low latency systems can help building robots that are very fast and one can think of the potential of what such robots can do to compensate for the relative slow reaction of humans...   

On time perception - depends who you are

I have not written in the last 12 days -- some of it were vacation in Eilat (a resort town in Israel near the Red Sea) and some just lazy time -- holiday period is over, tomorrow - back to work!   Back also to the Blog writing -- I was always fascinated by the notion of time, and wondered if everybody has the same perception of time.  Today I came across an article in the science and technology section of Economics - dealing with time perception within different animals.   It turns out that there is a metrics to measure the perception of time, which is called CFF-  critical flicker-fusion frequency that has to do with the frequency in which the eyes can refresh an image and thus determine the rate at which the information arrives to the brain.   The human CFF is 60HZ  (so 60 refreshes per second).    The movies and TV are adjusted to this frequency.   A dog's CFF is 80HZ, thus according to the article, it does not have interest in TV movies, since there is a mismatch which makes the movie to be out of sync.     A fly has  CFF of 250HZ which is a biological advantage, because a fly can react faster to threats and opportunities -- thus a movement we do towards capturing a fly seems as a slow motion movement to the fly and thus it can easily escape.   The different perception of time depends on the CFF, what we grasp as a second, a fly grasps as 4.15 seconds, and thus it subjective time perception is that it lives much longer than the time we perceive it living.   On the other side of the spectrum turtles have CFF of 15 HZ, thus one second in our time seems to a turtle like quarter of a second thus a turtle thinks that it actually moves fast...   Anyway -- can we take advantage of this to process events in different frequencies to provide different views of the universe?  I think that the potential of it should  be investigated..