During this presentation, I will give a brief introduction to RMIT University and our research activities in the Multimedia space. I will then consider two, connected research topics: Video Tagging in social networking environments and the Nav!t framework which allows social users to connect web content into tours for sharing and consumption. The presentation will be accompanied by demonstrations and videos of the applications.

Video Tagging in Social Networking environments

Video content both professionally and user generated is now a prime driver of Internet usage and activity. Simultaneously, the Internet has seen the rise of social networking sites and activity. In this work, we bring together video content and social networking to solve the problem of gathering metadata which describes user interaction, usage and opinion of video content. The work explores mechanisms by which implied and explicit semantics can be garnered from users interacting with media within social networks. This leads to the gathering of individual user interaction metadata which is then aggregated to form semantic metadata for a given video. The techniques have been implemented in a custom Flex application which is based around the Facebook API. This provides various mechanisms for the collection and display of descriptions of user interaction with video content. The work is then extended into adaptation, with the aim being to maximize user quality of experience. Approaches for gathering semantics that relate to user preferences when interacting with media content in social networks are proposed. Initial subjective results indicate that the proposed mechanisms can successfully provide information about user and social group media preferences that can be used for adapting multimedia for improved user quality of experience.

Nav!t: a universal approach to generating and sharing web tours

Web pages are everywhere and are used for information, marketing, entertainment and many other uses. However, our ability to record, share and to utilise WWW pages within our own creations is currently limited by browser technology. Recently there has been a distinct shift away from web pages towards applications, most markedly on mobile devices such as iphones and ipads, but recently on notebook and desktop machines. With this in mind, we sought to create a framework, known as Nav!t that would allow web pages to be consumed and then recorded as part of a tour. A tour can consist of any number of web pages and can be edited by a user to include music and comments. Progression through a tour of pages can be based on time but also based on geographic location and other external triggers. Current targeted applications are real-estate, education and entertainment. The Nav!t framework also allows tours to be generated once and then shared across a wide variety of

Since 2008, Ian has been Professor and Head of School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne and was previously with the University of Wollongong. His research interests extend from speech and audio compression and processing through to multimedia delivery and perception. Ian was Australian Head of Delegation to MPEG from 2002-2007and from 2004-2007 chaired the Multimedia Description Schemes subgroup at MPEG where he was extensively involved in the standardisation of MPEG-21. He was the editor of the ‚MPEG-21 book‘ which describes the Multimedia Delivery Framework and an editor of several parts of the standard. In the commercial world, Ian was a founder, and the founding CTO until June 2007, of enikos pty ltd, a start-up created to exploit IP generated in the MPEG-21 space. His current research in multimedia focuses on deep tagging of video content, and new approaches to web content on mobile devices while in audio he is working on multizone and walkthrough spatial audio systems.