A paper that can be extremely useful for people working on video accessibility. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the research in video abstraction. Although the focus is on the importance of abstraction for effective and efficient access of large volumes of video content, video abstraction can also be very useful for disabled users. Video abstraction: A systematic review and classification
The demand for various multimedia applications is rapidly increasing due to the recent advance in the computing and network infrastructure, together with the widespread use of digital video technology. Among the key elements for the success of these applications is how to effectively and efficiently manage and store a huge amount of audio visual information, while at the same time providing user-friendly access to the stored data. This has fueled a quickly evolving research area known as video abstraction. As the name implies, video abstraction is a mechanism for generating a short summary of a video, which can either be a sequence of stationary images (keyframes) or moving images (video skims). In terms of browsing and navigation, a good video abstract will enable the user to gain maximum information about the target video sequence in a specified time constraint or sufficient information in the minimum time. Over past years, various ideas and techniques have been proposed towards the effective abstraction of video contents. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic classification of these works. We identify and detail, for each approach, the underlying components and how they are addressed in specific works. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1198302.1198305 Full Proceedings: ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMCCAP), Vol. 3, No. 1, Article 3, February 2007.

Labels: abstraction, review, survey, video

An interesting paper from the 3rd International Conference on Human Robot Interaction investigating people's attitudes toward robot workers to identify the characteristics of occupations for which robots are qualified and desired. I really like the motivation of this paper; the authors say “the opinions of everyday people … are critical to the field of human-robot interactions because popular sentiment shapes technology adoption and because technologies are more usable if they take people's expectations into account”. Although this paper doesn't directly address accessibility, it does raise some interesting issues. Beyond dirty, dangerous and dull: what everyday people think robots should do We present a study of people's attitudes toward robot workers, identifying the characteristics of occupations for which people believe robots are qualified and desired. We deployed a web-based public-opinion survey that asked respondents (n=250) about their attitudes regarding robots' suitability for a variety of jobs (n=812) from the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET occupational information database. We found that public opinion favors robots for jobs that require memorization, keen perceptual abilities, and service-orientation. People are preferred for occupations that require artistry, evaluation, judgment and diplomacy. In addition, we found that people will feel more positively toward robots doing jobs with people rather than in place of people. Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1349822.1349827 Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Human robot interaction, Netherlands, March 12-15 2008.

Labels: human-robot interaction, survey